Celebrating Fred in life, love, and loss
I think back twenty-three years ago. I was thirty years old, which seems young to lose a parent. Though I suppose there aren’t many moments that feel like a “right time” for that.
A few days before my dad died, I got a call from him. I was in the middle of doing something so I didn’t pick up the phone. I heard his voice leaving a message on the answering machine (we didn’t have cell phones at that time!).
I didn’t get to return his call before I got “the call” from my mom letting me know my father had died of a heart attack. He was sixty-two years old.
I learned later that he had been in the midst of planning a karaoke party, and in that process, had made calls to all his friends to invite them. Apparently, he even called his brother in Taiwan, whom he rarely spoke to.
I love imagining him making arrangements for a singing party – something that brought him so much joy. (My dad had years of formal voice training, sang opera as a hobby, and threw karaoke parties at home long before that was even a thing!).
While I regret I didn’t pick up the phone the day he called, I’m comforted knowing he was able to have “final conversations” with many people he was close with.
Below is a poem I wrote for him while on the flight home from California to Massachusetts for his memorial service. It’s one of three poems I’ve written.
All of them kind of spilled out of me as if they had their own life. So it feels more accurate to say these poems “came through” me. I was merely a vessel.
I share my poem with you to honor my father, and to honor the cycle of life and death – the miracle and mystery of living and dying. It’s this cycle that bonds us together in a shared human experience.
It’s this cycle that seals our interconnection with all of life.
Passage
Your death came suddenly with unannounced arrival,
a stranger entering home without waiting for permission.
Were you prepared for the strain that heaved up into your chest?
Was it a flicker of freedom that graced you in that moment,
too much for your mortal body to bear?
Or was it the silent burden of your life as an immigrant man
striking out from your heart
finally
demanding attention?
Was it then that you slipped loose from this place,
like a clear, smooth and shiny stone
is released from the mouth of a river –
settling onto a stretch of shoreline
rest here now after silent passage through the elements:
wind water fire ice cold to the touch as I raise that pebble
to my lips.
~ Erica Peng 1998 in honor of my father, Peng Ming-sheng’s, life passage
If I could have a final call with my father now, what would I tell him?
I’d thank him for all the ways he has shaped and influenced me. I’d tell him I’m sorry I just wasn’t able to appreciate him while I was in my own angst and struggle. I spent much of my time disappointed in him, blaming him for all the ways I felt deficient.
I suppose if you’re a parent, you know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of your kid’s disappointment. In you.
There was a stretch of years in my late teens and into my twenties, when my Christmas and birthday gifts to him were self-help books. “Please Understand Me,” “Co-dependent No More,” “A Path with Heart.”
Sigh. Having me as a daughter wasn’t exactly a walk in the park.
So Dad….
I celebrate you. I honor your youthful idealism that buoyed you, as you made your passage from your home in Taiwan to this country. A young man in your mid-20s in pursuit of possibility.
I celebrate all the ways you were a consummate renaissance man with a PhD in chemical engineering and a minor in music.
Performing during “China Night” at Syracuse University as a graduate student.
I celebrate your gorgeous voice and how you kept your love of singing alive, even amidst the busyness and stress of life and work.
I celebrate your struggle – and your resilience – as you navigated graduate school in your third language, and raised a family without your own family close by to support you or honor your life milestones.
There is so much about who you were and what you did that I took for granted. Now that I’m an adult, I know clearly how much effort it took.
Here’s Fred singing two of his favorite songs, “Edelweiss” and “Try to Remember.”
I grew up with you doing vocal exercises every day. “Yeah, that’s just dad doing his weird practice.” I didn’t realize how important it was to see you pursuing your passion for the arts.
You exposed (dragged) my brother and I to live opera at a young age. We hated it. And I am so grateful you expanded our world through these experiences.
You started off every morning with a ten-minute headstand in the hallway between our bedrooms. How did you manage to keep your balance with us rushing back and forth right by you as we got ready for school?
You spoke about how you missed the water, after growing up near the ocean in southern Taiwan. So you bought a piece of land on a freshwater lake in western Massachusetts, and designed a summer cottage from the ground up using just a book with sample blueprints.
You created this life as an immigrant in a small New England town with only a handful of Chinese families. Speaking your third language. I can’t imagine.
This was also the time of the Vietnam War. Were you on the receiving end of any anti-Asian discrimination, either at work, and/or standing in line at the grocery store? Did you ever feel your safety – or ours – was threatened or at risk?
I wonder if anyone ever declared to you, “Go back where you came from.”
You retired early, after surviving surgery and radiation therapy from stage three colon cancer when you were 44 years old. That changed your life, and ours. You had a cancer recurrence eight years later and were given six months to live. I left college then and came home to be with you and help find alternative treatments. You lived another nine years.
Of the five other Chinese families in our town, two other fathers had cancer in their forties. One committed suicide after losing his job. I imagine you may have all been silently bearing the stress of being a Chinese immigrant man in a White environment. I don’t think you talked about your stress with each other. Or maybe anyone.
I know you chose to live in this town because it had good schools. And you wanted that. For me. Thank you, dad. Thank you.
I’m in awe of you. And I’m in awe about how so much of you, lives on through me.
Like you, I was inspired to design and build my own house. How many people actually do that? Let alone from the same family. And though my voice is nowhere near as developed as yours, fourteen years after you died, I started singing in an a cappella group. And loved it.
At forty-five years old, for the first time in my life, I started taking voice lessons. Every day, I stood by my piano doing vocal exercises. Like you did, for all those years.
Thank you for being a role model for giving myself permission to pursue joy.
I celebrate your effort and struggle - and all the resilience that came from it. An inspiring blueprint for how I’ve lived out my own life, many years later.
As I celebrate my father, I also celebrate the lives of all who passed through the cycle of life to death this year – unexpectedly and far too early. Most recently, the six Asian women who were killed in Atlanta. I also honor you – from being thrown into loss and grieving from losing someone, losing pieces of your own life, or just from bearing the toll of getting through a day during this time.
Throughout my life, I’ve struggled with and have learned how to hold the tension of life’s paradox.” Celebration and mourning. Beauty and brokenness. Joy and sorrow from being alive in the messiness of the human experience. This past year has elevated this to a collective experience.
I’ll share a song called “Blue and Grey,” by BTS, that has brought me great comfort these last few weeks.
For me, it’s a haunting anthem for this time. With courage and grace, the lyrics and music honestly capture and affirm the simultaneous heartbreak, tenderness – and resilience – that so many are experiencing now.