Her Hands His Eyes is a memoir written in real time. Every week I open the box a little further. A memory. A photograph. A recipe. This is Entry 1. You are reading this as I write it. When the book is ready you will be the first to know. Open The Box.
I watched my mother’s funeral on my cell phone. Losing a parent is an experience that changes you in ways you can’t foresee.
That is the sentence I have been trying to write for weeks and could not. I watched my mother’s funeral on my cell phone from 8,600 miles away in my living room in Florida while she was cremated at the temple in Kamphaeng Phet and I could not be there and I watched her ashes float down the Ping River on a screen four inches wide and I did not know what to do with my hands.
I still don’t.
Losing a parent is one thing. Losing a parent from 8,600 miles away on a cell phone screen is something I do not have words for yet. Maybe the book will find them. Maybe that is why I am writing it.
The Box Was Already Waiting
My father passed in 2001.
He left a brown cardboard box. Inside, more than a thousand slides wrapped carefully in Thai newspaper, each one a moment he had chosen to keep. I brought it home after the funeral. Put it in the closet. Told myself I would go through it once things settled.
Things never really settled. They never do.
Maryland. North Carolina. Florida. The box came too.
Every move, every new house, every new closet. I would find it during unpacking and sit with it for a moment. Feel the actual physical weight of it. A thousand slides. A thousand moments my father thought were worth keeping.
And then I would put it back. Not yet.
I couldn’t have explained that to anyone. I only know that every time I reached for it something in me said wait. And I trusted that feeling even when I couldn’t name it. Even after five years. Ten. Twenty.
Losing a parent once teaches you that grief has its own schedule. You don’t rush it. You don’t force it. You wait until you are ready and you trust yourself to know when that is.
I waited twenty-four years.
“Losing a parent is not one moment. It is a thousand small moments that come for you when you are not expecting them.”
What I Was Really Afraid Of
I knew what was in that box.
Not the specific slides. Not the specific moments my father had chosen to keep. But I knew what opening it would do to me. I knew it would unlock something I had been keeping locked for a long time.
Losing a parent is not one moment. It is a thousand small moments that come for you when you are not expecting them. A smell. A song. A box in a closet. You learn to walk carefully around the things that might undo you. You learn which doors to leave closed.
That box was a door.
After my mother passed I sat with the weight of both of them. My father gone since 2001. My mother gone now. Watching her ashes on a cell phone screen in my living room. Feeling the distance between Florida and the Ping River like something physical. Like something I could put my hands on.
I thought about everything she carried between two countries for fifty years and never once put down. The recipes that lived only in her hands. The language I lost at six years old and never got back. The altar she kept burning. The festivals she drove me to without explaining why.
She carried all of it. She never put any of it down.
And now it was gone with her.
And the box was still in the closet.
The Couch. The Scanner. Chris.
Chris put a 35mm slide scanner on the kitchen counter one Saturday morning without saying a word.
That is who he is. We have been together forty years and he still knows exactly what to do in the moments when there are no words for what needs doing. He did not say open it. He did not say you are ready. He put the scanner on the counter and he waited.
I got the box.
We sat on the couch together. I opened it. The smell of it. Thai newspaper, decades old, wrapped carefully around each slide the way my father wrapped everything, with intention, with care, like he knew someone would need to unwrap it someday.
I held the first slide up to the light.
Chris put his arm around me.
That is who he has always been. Every hard moment for forty years together. He always knows. He always shows up. He never makes it about himself. He just puts his arm around me and stays.
I placed the slide in the scanner.
The image appeared on the screen.
And something in me that had been locked for twenty-four years, through two houses and one funeral and 8,600 miles of distance and a cell phone screen and a river in Thailand, came open.
“My father had not just been keeping photographs. He was keeping proof.”
What I Found
What was inside is not something I am going to describe here. That is what the book is for.
What I will tell you is this. Sitting with what I found, slide by slide, I understood something I had not understood before. My father had not just been keeping photographs. He had been keeping proof. That we were there. That it was real. That this family crossed an ocean and built a life and never once lost what it came from.
My father had not just been keeping photographs. He was keeping proof.
Her hands in every kitchen. His eyes behind every lens. This is their story. It is also mine. And now finally I am ready to tell it.
Some things wait until you are ready. The box waited. So did I.
Losing a parent, losing both of them, does not only take something from you. It hands you something too. Something they were keeping until you were strong enough to hold it.
I am strong enough now.
What Comes Next
This is Entry 1 of Her Hands His Eyes, a memoir written in real time as I open the box.
In Entry 2 I go to the kitchen. I stand at my Florida stove with my mother’s ingredients in front of me and I try to write down what she never wrote down. The recipes that lived in her hands. The ones I watched her make my whole life without ever once thinking to ask.
I never got it exactly right. But I got it close enough.
