#Lookonthebrightside #Mothersday

It was cold Taiwanese dawn and the day after my 16th birthday. I said goodbye to Mom when I walked out the door to take the hour-long bus to school. We were still grieving Dad’s death due to a major heart attack six months earlier. The day went by as a typical school day. At the end of that day, I went to Mom’s office to meet her. But I learned that Mom had passed away that morning. I was told that it was an accident. She slipped and fell out of the 5th floor of a building after dropping my younger brother off at daycare.

No one seemed to know why, but I thought I knew. A teenage daughter, a severely disabled teenage daughter, and a three-year-old son were too much for Mom to carry on. I felt she deliberately walked out of my life when I needed her the most. For decades, I had mixed feelings of sadness, loss, and anger about her death.

Grieving for the loss of my parents has been the greatest challenge of my life. For a long time, my birthdays and Mother’s days were painful reminders that I missed my parents. The number of years that I have felt miserable is greater than the years that my parents were alive. After years of grief and anxiety, I decided to change my perspective when I was in pain. I chose to celebrate my parents for the years they had lived, not the years they lost. I decided to remember them about their LIVES, not their death. Not to take death as a tragedy but to celebrate their lives instead.

I started my journey to learn about them from photos, letters, and people’s memories. I also studied the short biography written by my grandpa about Mom. I researched events about their birth, growth, marriage, life difficulties, struggles with my disabled sister, the joys of having kids, and their feelings and dreams. Family photos of Dad, Mom, brother, sister, and I, reminded me that I wasn’t alone, unfortunate, and miserable. With my new understanding of them, I imagined I was at the scenes when my mom was born, the year when World War II ended, and when my Dad was a resilient child refugee during the War.

These new perspectives of looking on the bright side took my sorrow away. Now, I celebrate each Mother’s Day and my birthday by remembering the sweet memory of Mom. After almost 40 years of grief, I am finally no longer sad.