Bad Lament

I never had a chance to read the eulogy I wrote for my mother. Estranged for three years before her death, our relationship was fraught with lifelong difficulties. When she passed at the beginning of COVID lockdowns due to a heart attack, I attended her funeral via livestream at 4 a.m. from Seoul, listening as my father read the eulogy I had written, which for me, was salt crushed into the wound. Later, I recorded myself reading it—during a visit to New York, my first return to the States since before her death just to hear myself say it. I also recorded myself reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish, the Jewish funerary prayer, creating digital remnants of my grief including photogrammetric scans of her urn, my father’s orchid garden dedicated to her, childhood photos, and family mementos. These fragments were stored in a desktop folder—fragile, impermanent, yet the closest thing I had…