In which I am halfway.

This year, I turn 29. At this age, my mom had a 2 year old and 4 year old in tow. My parents were going through marital struggles and step by step, the stage was set for them to move to America and carve out a new life away from everything they had ever known. Four short years later, my dad’s dad died. Then two years after that, my mom’s mom died. I blurrily remember a handful of 15 hour flights back to Taiwan, some hospital visits, and a few months later, a funeral.

I wonder if my parents regretted moving so far away while their parents were ill. They couldn’t have known in advance. My grandfather, a lifelong smoker, had metastatic colon cancer and passed quickly. My grandmother, the same with glioblastoma multiforme. Even now, my dad, who mourns in silence, doesn’t readily share stories about his parents, but he wishes they were around. Even now, my mom thinks about her mom whenever she cooks. “I wish your a-ma were still around,” she’d say. “Everything she cooked was so good. I never asked her for any recipes.”

I lived at home with at least one of my parents until I was 25. I got married and moved out, then I moved across the country. I couldn’t wait to leave. 25 years of my mom asking when I’d be home? Of the little daily ignominies of parental nitpicking (you’re getting fat; don’t waste so much time on your phone; eat this [insert herbal item]; your teeth are yellow)? I wanted to feel like an adult and live life on my own terms.

Two years ago today, I matched to my top choice, a residency program in Los Angeles. It was everything I wanted — an exciting new city, a close church network, a chance to spread my wings a little and see what happened. R was happy, because his family would be only an hour away. My parents were happy for me, but I think they secretly hid their disappointment.

I am halfway through the program now. In the last two years, I’ve seen more death and loss than I ever have before. Woven in the stories of dying were parallel threads of regret and meaning. For many of my patients, they regretted how they spent their time. Nobody wishes on their deathbed that they accomplished more in their career. They don’t wish they made or spent more money. One patient, a highly successful young banker with metastatic breast cancer, said her greatest regret was not having the time to raise her kids; and now she would never see them grow up. A man with end stage heart failure told me one night that all he wanted was to leave the hospital and spend his last days doing the crossword with his wife and walking his dog around the block.

Sometimes with all these stories brimming inside, I just want to quit medicine and gather all my loved ones close and hold them there, immortal, until the end of time. But there are bills to pay, and I guess I do sort of like my job.

My parents called a few weeks ago. I had mentioned to them offhand that I’d be going to Florida in a few weeks for a friend’s wedding. My dad suggested that he fly down with my mom and their dog to catch us while we were there. It’d be a trip of hundreds of dollars for them, to see me for 18 hours, some of which I’d be at a wedding. “Mushu [our family dog] misses you,” he said. He knew I knew what he meant.

“I miss you” is a hard thing to say in a Chinese family, sometimes. It expresses vulnerability. It feels like something you’d say on a deathbed, or when seeing someone for the last time. Like “I love you,” it’s assumed, it’s tucked behind peeled and sliced persimmons, chopped into your favorite childhood dish when you come home to visit, wrapped up in bags of Costco-sized snacks that you have to smuggle home under your seat in economy basic. But said out loud? It feels dangerous. It feels final.

I realized from the call that I hadn’t made a trip back to visit my parents yet during residency. We’ve seen each other a few times. They visited, we went on vacation together, but I didn’t visit them at home. Wracked with guilt, I booked a last minute flight home for a weekend.

While I was home, I tried to do the impossible task of making up for two years away in a few days. That’s the problem with long distance. Every meeting feels like a celebration. You go out to restaurants, you do day trips to sightsee or book reservations for shows. Nobody travels across the country to fold the laundry together, or to crack open pistachios while watching the news. But that’s what I wanted. I wanted the ordinary life I was missing out on. I wanted to clean the bathroom together, to chop up garlic for my dad, to drive my mom to work and hear her gossip about her students’ parents. I wanted to eat leftovers for breakfast and hear about their random dreams the night before. This time I visited, I noticed my mom’s hair had a little more gray in it than before. My dad’s back hurt before it snowed. They bickered a little, but not like before. They had new hopes. My dad is now into growing herbs and vegetables indoors. He’s looking into new places to live, somewhere warmer and less expensive.

Our bodies change a little every day. Old cells die, new cells are made. Eventually through slow turnover, we become totally different material than we were before. As my parents age, I wonder, am I missing out on chances to learn again who they are becoming?

Before I moved to California, I thought adult life meant necessarily being far from one’s parents. After all, that’s what it meant for my parents. It was nice, but strange, to hear from med school classmates that they wanted to apply to residencies around home, “to be near family.” But now, as R and I are looking to plan our future, and every few months someone asks us about plans after residency, I can’t tell where my internal compass is pointing.

Part of working in emergency medicine is that I get reminded daily how commonplace and mundane death and disability are. This weekend, I had a patient, 92 years old, who was seen on the camera puttering around the house. She had stopped to scrutinize a spider on the wall, then suddenly, without provocation, collapsed. She arrived unresponsive — a devastating brain bleed. She passed later that day. On the other hand, there’s the 50-year-old who got drunk at a July 4th party and tripped into the pool when nobody else was looking. On shift, I don’t have time to process these things. There’s more people to see, waiting anxiously to see what is going to happen to them. Everyone’s having their worst day in a long time in the Emergency Department.

But when the shift is over and I step out of the hospital into senseless sunlight like a moviegoer after a double-feature, I pray, “Thank You, Lord, for this day.” No day is guaranteed to us. But we can choose what we treasure today.