by Won Lee

2026 Winner, Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction

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In the early days, when my father was still training to be my mother’s caregiver, he would tell me of his nightmares about needles. In them, he’d be sweating beside my mother, bent over her arm as he struggled to find the fistula. He’d have already pierced the access point, but because the body isn’t static, the fistula—the artery sewed to a vein—would shift location, sometimes lower, sometimes higher, sometimes to the left or to the right. He would probe inside her arm as my mother cried out. Every second he failed to find the flap would prolong her pain, which was his alone to cause, this needle an extension of his finger whose every touch brought her tears. 

He would tell me this over the phone in soft-spoken tones: how his nightmare would then bleed into reality, struggling that same morning to find the fistula, my mother writhing while he searched, each minute paid by a struck nerve, until he was broken down before he even began. Yet the next session he would do it again, shouldering this task, without which my mother could not live but with which my father could not either, his weeks alternating between the days he had to take up the needle and the days he spent dreading picking one up. 

I felt guilt that I could not do this for him, that no one could step in and lift this burden of saving her life. And he saved it—still saves it—each time he sets up the cycler, hangs the bags of solution, opens the clamps, and lets the blood flow to be cleansed, so she can rise from her chair to live another day. 


In their Maryland home, my parents set up a treatment space in a spare room off the living room. The setup includes one table for the cycler—a console that pumps and filters fluids—and another strewn with gloves, gauze pads, and tubing. There’s the waste bin where my father discards his bloodstained gloves and used lines. Along the wall are stacks of boxes of five-liter bags with dialysis solution, countless more of which he stores in the basement and carries upstairs from time to time. But the most important item, in the center of the room, is the brown leather chair my mother sits in for the duration of the multi-hour sessions.  

This chair, which cost $600, is the one piece of furniture my mother avoids during her “off” days, and even right after hemodialysis. “She never sits in it otherwise,” my father once told me as he plopped down on it. “It’s a shame because it’s quite comfortable.” I tried it myself a few times, and it was indeed luxurious: the back supportive but cushioned, arms composed of plush leather, levers to recline and adjust the footrest. Under different circumstances, it would make a great reading chair. But when I later asked my mother about it, she sidestepped my question. “Oh, I don’t know why I dislike it,” she said in Korean, before changing the subject. To be honest, I’m not sure why I asked. I already knew what the chair had become for her, and that it could never be a place of comfort. Everything, each throe and episode of despair, was inscribed in that chair. And so instead she shunned the chair, as we all implicitly did while moving throughout the house, the impressions in the cushions calling out for a body—her body—to come and sit, to return to the prison of her condition, the failure of her physiology. 


In the fall of 2019, before my mother started dialysis, my father organized a family trip to the West Coast. He rented a beach house in Aptos, California, and we traveled there by way of San Francisco. My partner and I flew in from Oregon, and my parents and siblings—Thomas and Kyung—from Maryland. The rationale behind the trip was that because my mother’s mobility would soon be greatly affected, we should all take one more trip to a favorite place of hers. Though this later proved to be something of a false forecast—with enough preparation, my parents learned to travel with the machine on rare occasions—at the time this possible future hung over our heads like the overcast that marked our first days there, threatening to flood us with grief. 

It held back until the last day at the beach house. We enjoyed, or wore the semblance of enjoying, the ordinariness of our sightseeing—taking a drive to Muir Woods, where my parents stood marveling beneath the ancient redwoods; strolling through the streets of San Francisco and eating seafood on the northern waterfront; searching for condors while hiking at Pinnacles National Park; and visiting Monterey Bay, where we spent time at the aquarium. 

The last of these destinations was the unstated objective of our trip. It was the place my parents took the three of us after my mother’s cancer diagnosis decades prior. At the time, I was two years old, and her prognosis was terminal; she had a rare form of cancer, her odds of survival less than one percent. In a last-ditch effort to create some memories, my parents landed on the aquarium, a family favorite for its displays of tropical fish, the moray eels lurking in crevices, the hammerheads whose diametrically opposed eyes made us wonder at life’s variability. 

But more than any of these exhibits, we all gravitated toward the Mola mola, or the ocean sunfish, whose titanic form and stately procession around its tank entranced us. Silver-finned with an eye on each side of its disc-shaped body, it shone with the miracle of an underwater sun, a living one that returned us to an animistic universe where the elements were alive. It was evidence of an order to reality where all things in the sea and sky found their mirror and meaning. Especially for my parents, I think this is why they so loved this fish that served as witness: that my mother’s sickness wasn’t random, but written into the fabric of things. 


Time behaves strangely when death approaches, then defers. We are familiar with the trope that every second with a terminally ill person acquires a heightened preciousness, the need to fulfill their last wishes taking on a sudden urgency, as old grievances fall away. But what happens when, after all the recalibration and anticipatory grief, the person lives? 

In my mother’s case, this has been the motif of her life. Over and again, between cancer and recurrence, solution and complication, she’d end up in the ER, on an operating table, my father sending my siblings and me an urgent text that this might be it. But then, by some twist of fate, she would survive. She would make it through the procedures, the treatment would work, the cause would be found in time, the surgeon’s hands would be just deft enough. And our mother would again be ours, able to eke out a few more years, returning to us never healthy but alive nonetheless, and about this we were happy, or at least believed ourselves to be. 

Yet each round of anticipatory grief wore away at us. Our psyches could only bear so many almosts until the realization that, at times, we were disappointed by how what was promised wasn’t given, that we could not find release and step into the mourning our lives had become one long prelude to. It is not easy to admit, but we came to crave the black sun of the aftermath. It was more than curiosity and less than total desire, but it was as real as our guilt when we wished for it. 

It was clear there was no winner in the zero-sum game of our mother’s survival. The deferral of loss atrophied our relief, until we noticed only how her scar tissue had found a counterpart in the hardness we inexplicably came to possess. 
 

During that trip, I saw the sunfish in Monterey for the first time as an adult. Two aspects struck me that I’d never noticed as a child. The first was that its body was scarred—slashed and indented with its history before captivity. There were bite marks from encounters with predators, lesions from parasites, and a torn fin, which trailed in the water like a tattered flag. It made me remember the time I accidentally saw my mother naked. She’d always been careful to keep her body hidden from me throughout the years, but one time during a stay at a hotel, I walked in on her changing. It was only a glimpse, and I apologized right away while closing the door behind me, but it was enough to imprint itself in my mind—the patchwork of irregular and clustered scars, the map of all that had been done to her. 

In that moment, I could not bear to look at her, even as I would not avert my gaze. And as I stared at the sunfish, this was what I saw—the grooves in her flesh, the writing of the scalpel, the palimpsest of healed tissue that could never replace what had been cut away. My mother was the sunfish, and the sunfish was my mother, exchanging places in a way that was all too mortal until I could not stare at them any longer—neither the captive swimming endlessly around its tank nor my mother watching it through the glass. 

The second feature I noticed about the Mola mola was how it wasn’t exactly a sun in the typical sense. Rather than being the center of a system around which other bodies revolve, it would circle some unseen center in its tank as if the real sun were absent, the void around which the dead and living hurtle without end. In this same manner, the sunfish seemed on the brink of madness, tracing the circumference of its conical prison in a ceaseless rotation, a sad carousel around a simulacrum of ocean—tracing it until the day the sunfish extinguished and sank to the depths of its tank to settle on the floor.  


If you took an accounting of all the supplies each dialysis session uses, it would amount to hundreds of pounds. There is foremost the cycler, which weighs some ninety pounds. And then there are the bags of solution, which collectively add another fifty-five. These make up most of the paraphernalia, but there are of course filters, lines, syringes, needles, masks, gloves, gauze, a blood pressure monitor, and a thermometer, which together contribute an additional twenty pounds or so. 

During the first mornings I sat with my mother during her dialysis sessions, I was struck by the quantity of trash produced at the end: the lines and used needles that my father gathered, the empty syringes and bloodied gauze he placed in a plastic bag before stripping off his gloves and discarding them with the rest. It was clear that her survival came at a cost, the removal of waste from her blood made possible by the disconcerting generation of a different kind of waste. 

As someone who is conscious about my consumption, I brushed against this double bind: it felt wrong to consume so much to sustain one person, but on the other hand this person was not just anyone, but my mother. It was a situation that brought me disenchantment with this medical “solution,” which still felt primitive in its effectiveness. Though many take pride in healthcare’s advancements, whenever I saw the extent of what was needed to perform the work of my mother’s dysfunctional kidneys, I felt strongly that this pride was misplaced. After all, this pair of organs—each just five inches long and weighing about half a pound—is a marvel of nature, an intricate machine that can function better than this medley of equipment. It is a contrast I still think about from time to time, how a pound of kidneys can outdo hundreds of pounds of supplies. 


It was the final night of our stay in Aptos when our grief finally descended on us. My father sat us down in the living room to tell us what dialysis would mean for our lives going forward. It was a cool evening and the windows were closed, and all of us were sitting on different couches, our attention focused on our father as he spoke. 

“I don’t know how long she will live once she starts,” my father began. “Statistics say life expectancy is five to ten years.” He paused to glance at my mother. “But she’s starting at an earlier age than most. And I’ve heard some even live for twenty or thirty years.” I watched his face to see what he believed. “More importantly,” my father continued, “our mobility will be greatly limited. We might not even be able to travel, and if we can, who knows for how long.”
 
His words hung in the air as if searching for somewhere to settle. I had already heard snippets of this, as we all had at various times when we’d called home. But there was something about being together that made it real. Before he could finish, some hidden latch opened, and Kyung began to cry. “Umma, saranghae,” Kyung choked out between sobs. “I love you.” My mother nodded and started to tear up. 

“But we’re in this as a family,” my father said, as if this platitude would in any way placate us. For all of us it felt, at last, like the home stretch of her illness, the time we’d spent years preparing for. But when it came, it was just a heaviness as pure as our feelings welling up. 

My father stopped talking, and for an interval we sat listening to Kyung cry. I don’t know what expression I wore on my face, but Thomas picked at his toenail as if a speck was lodged there. Then he looked up. “I can’t,” he said, and stood and walked out of the living room, leaving the rest of us to watch him go. 

In that instant, I wanted to say something. But what could I say? Our silence was already articulate. In it was our fear and trembling, our mourning and the love that made it possible. As we sat there, our silence connected us like a constellation, the four of us in the living room and Thomas back in his bedroom, doubtless staring at some empty point on the wall like a shadow of the vacancy we were waiting for our mother to leave. And like our shared vigil, this night would be gone when we woke the next morning and knew that life went on, that we would go on, burying our grief into the depths of who we were.           

 
These days, when I reunite with my mother, I can tell from her face whether it was a dialysis day. There’s a certain pallor to her cheeks, a weariness that requires her to lie down, an irritability that can tip into a glazed-over stare that does not see, an absentmindedness that listens but does not hear. 

On these occasions, the most I can do is sit beside her and look—really look—at what she has become. And as I do, I imagine the future before us: a cardiac monitor, an IV line from her arm, a vase of flowers on the mantle, and myself at her bedside, saying goodbye. It is what lies ahead, and though I suppress this image, it superimposes itself over the scene before me. Her chair is already a kind of bed in which she reclines during dialysis, watching a show on her phone, pretending she is not in this room but inside the screen, living the romance or else the comic relief, while beside her the cycler whirs and my father checks his emails, rising to his feet to record her vitals or adjust the machine’s settings. 

Where do I fall in this orchestration of supine body, nurse, and machine? The answer is in her expression when I enter the room. My presence reads as a different kind of escape for her. I am a respite from her solitude, but even more so, I am a reason she endures, wishing as she does to live a little longer for her children. 


Somewhere in my mind, I see her moving through the house. It is her off day and she is lighthearted, telling me how the violets have bloomed in the garden. “Come look,” she says, taking me by the hand to the bay window, through which we can see the maple and the hedges, the sun filtering in to caress our cheeks. My gaze moves from the view to her face, her gray-streaked hair, the sunken pockets out of which her eyes stare through the glass at a lushness that was never hers.

But there is another scene I also picture. I am on the other side of the window, barely able to see her silhouette against the reflected light. The glass contains her, and I can only approach the pane, laying my palm on its surface, wanting to bring her where I am. And she smiles at me sadly, pressing her own palm to the window as if to say, It’s okay. I’m happy you’re out there. Go on and live your life. I hold my hand there a moment longer, then let it drop to my side. I start to move away toward the garden’s edge, stopping every few steps to glance over my shoulder. Go on, her eyes say, and I keep walking until she is in the distance, until I barely see her, until I see nothing at all.