A SEASON OF LIVING | Isabelle Li

It is two weeks into July when my grandfather announces to the world that he is ready to die. I look at him in disbelief. Because it is summer and the season of living. Because the mulberries on our tree haven’t ripened yet, and nothing interesting has occurred in months. To leave now would be a shame, but he merely shrugs and bends down to nurse our cardboard box of silkworms, turning their fat little bodies over with a stick. He had been watching them feast for a while now, counting their pale heads whenever they slugged over. My father tells me that my grandfather has been ready to die his whole life. He is like his worms. Does nothing except eat and sleep.

It is summer when my grandfather is put to rest. He lies in a bed that is no longer his own, blanketed in fibers and told that the years of lying in wait have degraded his blood vessels to the point that everything finally burst inside his head. I see the scan myself, hemorrhagic and beautiful. But he is discontent, strangled between his feeding tube and IV, caught in the idea of living. He calls me over to his bedside, hands cupped over his mouth.

Back when my silkworms first cocooned, he says, I left the whole box outside. The birds picked clean every delicate body I spent years turning over and over. At the time, I thought it was strange. To raise something just to watch it die, to sleep away parts of your life. But somewhere by that white hospital bed, I realized if I squinted hard enough, the tubes and monitors and wires would all become wings, and I watched my grandfather climb out of himself, his form so pale and light that he burst free.

Isabelle Li is a student at Johns Hopkins University, where she studies molecular biology and the medical humanities. Her work centers around family, history and cultural memory.