Past Lives

Four years of grieving what was and accepting what is.

When I’m with Janet, I wonder where my mom is. She might wonder the same about her daughter. 

When I dropped her off on Saturday after a visit at her former home, I hugged her and told her I loved her. She politely replied, “Thank you for having me over today,” like she would to a neighbor she doesn’t know very well who randomly invited her in for tea. 

I hope her daughter still exists in her mind as someone younger and more carefree, with fewer grey hairs and fewer hurts. I wish I still existed that way, too, but I accept what is.

If she doesn’t recognize me as her daughter and I don’t recognize her as my mom, we are virtually strangers. We are linked through blood and birth, but as if in a past life.

Aaron and I watched the film Past Lives on Saturday night (potential spoilers ahead). In it, Korean childhood sweethearts Nora and Hae Sung are separated by a move and reconnect intermittently throughout their lives. They know each other so well from their younger years, yet are strangers as adults. They seem destined to be together, but as they grew up, their paths diverged in such a way that makes it nearly impossible.

The concept of in-yun is woven throughout the film. Nora explains: “It’s an in-yun if two strangers even walk past each other in the street and their clothes accidentally brush, because it means there must have been something between them in their past lives. If two people get married, they say it’s because there have been 8,000 layers of in-yun over 8,000 lifetimes.”

At one point, Hae Sung wonders if they are currently experiencing a past life, and what will their relationship be in the next?

The film is gorgeous and heartbreaking; the perfect example of holding many opposing truths at once, and of grieving what was and accepting what is.

I don’t know if in-yun applies to mothers and daughters, but I do know my mom and I have left our marks on each other. I hope it’s enough. 

It comforts me to think that, while her body remains here on Earth, my mom’s spirit—the very essence of her that I’ve watched gradually fade away over the past four years—may already be somewhere between this life and the next, waiting to know me again.