Simon Says

I don’t know how to solve a problem like grief.

Countertransference is when you allow the ghosts of your past to superimpose themselves on your present—when we are revisited by those we once loved, or who we still love, or who we wished we had loved better. It's a concept psychiatrists use to maintain professional distance, but more recently I’ve been wondering if this is also how we make sense of the world. 

As a young physician-to-be, I sometimes catch glimpses of my family or old friends or old teachers I thought I had forgotten. 

And sometimes I catch glimpses of my grandfather.

My Ye-Ye, Simon Sze, passed away in November 2023. I always thought of him as a relentlessly practical man; he was an electrical engineer, which is something that was reflected in the way he went through life. There is a collection of “Ye-Ye-isms” my family sometimes pokes fun at. One of my favorites is: “Why pay more? Because it’s better.”

As an engineer, I think he liked to think of the world in terms of perfect cause and effect. He exercised, ate healthily, had a large social circle and a successful career. Compared to the rest of my grandparents (either lifetime smokers or with several chronic health conditions), I think all of us thought that he was going to live forever.

Recently, I had someone ask me if I had been allowed to be sad as a child—a lot of people think that extremely dark children’s movies like The Land Before Time or Bridge to Terabithia or The Secrets of Nimh (or whatever other movie you remember that traumatized you) were made to help children practice big emotions before they need them.

I don’t know how many of us actually learn lessons from dark movies, but I don’t think I ever did. When I was very, very young there were a couple years where we stopped watching Beauty and the Beast because I was convinced that the scene at the very end—where the beast becomes human—was the scene where the beast actually died and I became inconsolable. My parents had to rewind the tape to when he was still alive (as the beast), and then turn the TV off.

So, no: I don’t know how to solve a problem like grief.

I sometimes wonder if I’m missing the point of the entire thing—that it isn’t a problem to solve. After all, almost any other emotion has some kind of solution, something that can or should be done: anger is (by nature) directional, fear is solved by curiosity, and anxiety through preparation or avoidance. 

In this way, grief is often transformed; in many ways it’s easier to ignore something than it is to grieve. Just after my grandfather passed, I interviewed Nancy, an older woman who told me that she wished her children would visit her more often. She didn’t think they understood how serious her health had become. She told me about the surgery that she thought would fix things—and how it didn’t work. Nancy told me that she had been talking to God, that she had been telling him that she was ready to come home. 

In the hospital I watched a man pass over a few days. His family had all made it into town with one exception: his daughter. She called her mother once to say that she had already said her goodbyes, that she didn’t see the need and there was no benefit to her, and then immediately left for remote hiking location with no cell service.

I think it’s easier for families to be angry than it is for them to grieve: in the last hours while he was still coherent (and even when he had crossed into incoherence) he was looking for her. I don’t think she realized that her presence (or absence) was about more than just her: so much of what we do to honor our loved ones is more for the living than it is for the dead. 

The day after my grandfather passed, someone close to the family sent us an AI-generated obituary to review for “edits” by the end of the day. Horrified, I dropped everything to work with other family present to write an accurate version that was true to his legacy. This was all for nothing: after receiving the new version, they let me know that they had already submitted “Chat’s” version for publication. I think they thought of this as a favor to the family. The next morning I had to call the newspaper to correct his place of birth. 

Physicians often talk about quality of life and preservation of function— with the caveat that an outsider's view may be very different from the patient’s desires. I think about the things that give us meaning in our lives.

The way my Nai-Nai, my grandmother, tells it, things were going alright until my Ye-Ye lost fine motor control in his hands. My dad says it was like he had oven mitts on. It’s still not clear to any of us if he stopped eating because he was fiercely independent and didn’t want to live like that, or because the cancer had spread, or because he just knew that it was time.

I think I’ve heard that grief is proof of having loved someone or something. It becomes easy for this to twist into a new meaning, where grief becomes the price of love. I don’t like this answer. I don’t like this solution, but I’m beginning to wonder if love and grief are more similar: A few months later one of my friends watched her father die of cancer in the same accelerated fashion. I remember driving three hours with some of her friends to help her move his belongings, including his huge armchair that we special-rented a U-Haul for, and begging her to let me cook for her. I don’t know how to solve a problem like grief, but in many ways it’s much easier to do something than it is to do nothing. I told her that if it would help, she could think about eating my cooking as a favor to me. 

Many Chinese-American families (like mine) would likely disagree with me on this, but I think love is more about understanding someone than it is about changing them. I wonder if grief is the same way—my grandmother spent the hour after my Ye-Ye passed trying to understand. Why it had happened so quickly, if there was anything else they could have done differently. He started his new, state-of-the-art and obscenely expensive medication around the same time he took a turn for the worse. It became clear to us pretty quickly that she wanted to know if the targeted chemotherapy is what accelerated his decline. The difficult thing is that we’ll never know for sure. 

I wonder if grief is about understanding the same way love is. There are things I understand about him now that I wasn’t able to while he was still here. 

Nancy told me about her childhood and I wonder if her grandchildren know that she rode with Hell’s Angels for a couple years. I hope they do. 

I think about being in Taiwan later that year for a memorial service held by one of the universities my Ye-Ye taught at. We got to see his office, the videos of his multiple interviews, and the dozens and dozens of cascading white orchids donated by people and institutions across the nation. My father gave a speech entirely in Chinese in front of a thirty-foot-tall poster of my grandfather. We met the mayor of the city and received a framed, signed letter from the president of Taiwan.

It’s sometimes hard to see people for who they are when you’re family: Growing up, my grandfather was just the guy who would make us watch The Sound of Music two or three times every time we visited or every time they visited us. Beginning from the time I was eight (my brother was three), he would sit all of us down for hours-long lectures about the importance of Floating Gate Memory, his invention. He had round-rimmed glasses with nerdy clip-on sunshades that he carried in a suede case and he wore a tweedy newsboy cap everywhere. There were a couple of years where he would call my father every weekend to ask for edits to his application to the Nobel Prize Committee. When we went on family trips he would insist on eating at Chinese restaurants, no matter how bad they were. Visiting Paris? The finest French dining is no comparison to the run-down and abandoned Chinese restaurant on the outskirts of town. He used to determine how fancy a restaurant was by how long the pepper shaker was. He tried to teach my brother, then seven, how to solve a multivariable calculus equation. 

I think it would be fair to say that America cares about Taiwan because of semiconductors. Floating Gate Memory was one of the inventions that enabled the digital age and the industrial boom, and allowed this industry to begin. More than that, though, my grandfather’s passion and skill as a professor inspired multiple generations of electrical engineers. It bothers me that I wasn’t able to appreciate his legacy while he was alive.

Nancy tells me about her belongings and I think about all the things my aunt helped my Nai-Nai throw out after his death. One of the biggest surprises for my sister and me was that almost everything in the house belonged to him instead of my grandmother. Their house was filled with the sentimental possessions of a relentlessly practical man. I wonder if he, like Nancy, kept them to remember times or places that were important to him. 

I don’t know how to solve a problem like grief, but I wonder more and more if that’s not what the point is. If it’s more about understanding than it is about anything else.