Max Lin
The funeral director was a used car salesman in another life.
Maybe even in this life. Maybe Gary’s shift at Big Auto Dealer of College Point starts in an hour.
Chun Fook Funeral Services in Flushing, Queens has laminate wood walls that reflect its fluorescent bulbs. Mounted to these walls, a display of tombstone swatches: marble, gray granite, black granite, red granite, and speckled beige straight from a ’90s Tuscan kitchen countertop. Welcome to Death Depot.
Gary, a boxy middle-aged man with gelled black hair, flashes his big white veneers and claps me on the back.
“Great eye, granite is always timeless! Now which color you like?”
I don’t give a shit which color, Gary.
But definitely not that shade of red. And could I see those engravings again?
“Yes, yes, good! Bamboo engraving is an excellent choice. Very prosperous! You married, Max?”
“No.”
“Ha! Lucky.”
We watched the body get carried out yesterday.
“Ai, wait. This color granite you picked is too popular. Unfortunately, not available for months. China trade war, what can you do!” Gary pauses for laughter. Silence.
I wonder if he always workshops his standup material on the grieving here at Chun Fook Funeral Services in Flushing. It’s a tough crowd. I don’t envy him.
Gary leads us to a showroom so my father and I can look at caskets. With cartoonish strain, he mimes the heaviness of the bronze casket lid compared to the mahogany. “You try!”
My phone flashes with texts from my father’s extended family group chat: “Oh my god” “Call me as soon as you can please”
My mother told me not to tell them she was sick. The tendrils of rural Chinese culture ran too deep: her diagnosis was a moral failing on her part, a blight to keep hidden.
When we return to his office, Gary’s jester face softens.
“And will you want the monks?” Gary says.
The what?
The monks, he explains, would chant prayers over my mother as part of a traditional Wenzhounese ceremony.
She didn’t really believe in that stuff—whatever sect of Buddhism my dad’s family followed. She sat through Bible studies on Zoom with my aunt in Texas, oscillating between hope, resignation, and fatigue. At best, her philosophy was “Maybe do it just in case.”
But also, the monks are an extra $10,000.
“We’ll pass on the monks.”
Now, the question of the hour: What will she wear?
From the corner of Gary’s office, my father rolls out the suitcase they brought to the hotel where she stayed in her last days. My mother didn’t want to die in a cold hospital. True to her style, she booked a boutique hotel room. If death was coming for her, it could find her overlooking New York Harbor on high thread-count sheets. But the unconventional setting also meant the police got involved with questions: “Why a hotel?” “Who found the body?” “Was this expected?” They tallied her oxycodone pills one by one to rule out overdose and foul play.
We unzip the suitcase, emptying out polyester shorts, wool socks, a powder pink sweatshirt from Marshalls with a kitten print that says “Being kind costs nothing.” It didn’t hurt as much for her to put on.
“Maybe these shoes,” my father says.
The shoes are geriatric white nurse sneakers.
“Absolutely not,” I say.
She prided herself on the way she dressed.
In our Forest Hills apartment, my mother, an FIT graduate, studied Project Runway and fashion shows where models pounced the catwalk with steely expressions. As a chubby little gay kid, I’d sit next to her and sketch clothing designs, all impractical with the same asymmetrical off-the-shoulder look—the height of women’s fashion in my nine-year-old mind. “Good,” she nodded when I showed her these drawings.
Her career as a technical designer ended up being more “Do the measurements of the spandex hug the waist well enough for these Walmart leggings?” and less high fashion. Function over fantasy. But in life, the woman loved a good pair of shoes.
My mother’s style was polished and confident. She stomped between worlds in a swirl of electric prints and textures: paisley, zebra stripes, florals. Items and accessories were selected with taste and a hint of mischief. Houndstooth parachute pants. A chunky turquoise necklace. The measured clack of her heels on our tiled apartment hallway was my cue to turn off the GameCube and get back to my homework.
In one of my favorite photos of my mother from the late ’80s, she and my father are standing in front of a temple in China. She’s wearing a deep red silk dress with a sash at the waist, a cream brooch where the neckline dips, the fabric draping in gorgeous shimmering waterfalls down her small frame. It’s dramatic and elegant. She looks like Joan Chen in Twin Peaks. My dad looks nice. He ironed his shirt.
“Max everything ok?? Let me know if u need anything”
Frank, my mom’s boyfriend. I lock my phone.
Gary tells me that we can bring in the outfit she’ll be wearing later this week, along with any personal items we wish to leave in the casket with her.
The Ancient Egyptians packed their tombs with clothes, gold, and little boats to help the soul cross into eternity. The Vikings sent their dead off with weapons and jewelry. And in Ghana, Ga people bury loved ones in “fantasy coffins” shaped like objects tied to their identities: footballs, lions, fishing boats. I wonder what kind of vessel we’d pick for my mom.
In the last few months, all my father and I did was fight about decisions: radiation or chemo, this drug, that trial, work or FMLA, home or hospice. Our last shouting match came to a quiet halt when he said, “I don’t want to lose my best friend.”
Today, he asks me to handle the logistics. The man I used to look up to and even fear as a kid now looks small, a statue staring into the distance.
My parents divorced when I was five. When my mom worked late, dinners in high school were a $20 bill on the table, a takeout menu, and a message on rose-print stationery: “Pick up the one u like. Love u to the moon.” On the corner of the note, her signature French fashion sketch of a woman’s side profile—she could do this by muscle memory. Despite being separated, my mother always loved my father. They coparented like a team.
She tolerated Frank.
Before my mother’s passing, I waded through murky relationship dynamics and the strange lies my parents constructed for Frank. When my father visited my mother at her boyfriend’s apartment, he was her “cousin,” not her ex-husband. He picked up my mother to take her to treatments and dodged Frank at every turn. Sitcom-level hijinks from the serious, scholarly man who would recite Chinese epics from memory. That, of course, raised an eyebrow from Frank: “Why doesn’t your cousin ever stick around?”
All of this to say, my father isn’t going to Frank’s to pick out my mom’s funeral outfit. Instead, my boyfriend Jack offers to come with me for support.
At home, I empty out the backpack I brought to the funeral home: a crushed plastic water bottle. A Manila envelope with funeral invoices and copies of the death certificate for Livia Yu Lin.
At birth, my mother’s name was Feng.
To my father, to her friends, to me, and on her U.S. passport, my mother’s name was Livia. My father gave her this name as she embarked to America for the first time. He had a name book and everything—one intended for newborns and not adult women. He liked the name Olivia, meaning “olive tree,” hoping it could signify new life and growth. They dropped the “O” so they could have matching initials: LYL and LYL.
When my mother was with Frank, she became Tiffany. Over the years, she had started to use this name on some of her social media accounts. Frank would always call her Tiff. He’d already known her by Livia, so I’m not sure when the switch happened. It’s not like one name had more syllables or that Livia was harder to pronounce. Maybe some things she just wanted for herself.
Jack and I get off the subway at King’s Highway in Brooklyn. The sun is bright and blinding, and the 4-minute walk to her building becomes the longest stretch of concrete. Jack takes my hand and squeezes.
The building where she used to live with Frank is on a quiet street, its facade a functional tan brick. The glass door at the entrance gets stuck sometimes, and the landlord posts grainy CCTV photos of package thieves on it. I push through it with my whole shoulder, the hinge honking with its release. We climb the stairs to Apartment 3C.
Text from my dad: “I saw her in my dream last night.”
Frank opens the door, his face swollen from crying. At 6’2”, he’s an Italian boulder, part whiskey gut and part college gym muscle. Frank talks in a booming voice, wearing a black t-shirt and baggy joggers. He has two PlayStation 5s—the second one he ordered by accident and never bothered to return. Frank and I usually exchange two sentences about the latest Marvel movie and “You heard they got Homelander in Mortal Kombat?” We sit in silence otherwise. I’ve tried a few times to imagine this man and my mother, a sharp sparrow of a woman, on their first date. What did they talk about?
Frank pulls me in for a hug.
He doesn’t know I’m gay. My mom told me he wouldn’t understand. That I wouldn’t need to explain myself to a man I’d probably never see again. So today, Jack is my “friend helping me out.” What’s one more lie? And with our deep voices and painfully safe sartorial choices (T-shirt and straight jeans on this visit), we do look to the undiscerning eye like two good friends who happen to stand next to each other a lot. And maybe today, my voice drops an extra octave and Jack’s subconscious Bay Ridge accent hits the t’s a little harder.
In the living room, Gucci rattles her cage. She’s an African Grey parrot that Frank got a decade ago. The name came from him, surprisingly, not my mom.
My mother loved this bird. Like fed-her-apple-slices-from-her-mouth-and-called-her-“Gucci-girl” loved her. And Gucci loved her back. One day, Gucci, who famously preferred sitting in her cage, flew onto my mother’s shoulder and rested there. (My bird-watcher friend told me that meant something.)
In the last few years, Gucci has started pulling out her feathers.
Frank’s father is also here. It’s my first time meeting him. He looks like a shorter, redder Ray Liotta. He holds me by the shoulders and he tells me that Tiffany was family. So I’m family, too. It takes me a second to remember who Tiffany is. And I feel guilty that my dad told me Frank shouldn’t come to the burial. “Close family only.”
But right now, we have to dress my mother.
Jack tells me we have a sacred duty. We’re two queer men tasked with assembling a fashion icon’s final look. It’s a challenge out of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Racers, start your engines.
We get to work.
In her bedroom (my mother found it easier to sleep separately from Frank in those last days), we dig through mounds of clothing, her wigs resting on their stands. She never let me see her without them on. As we ransack her private space, these canvas heads are sentinels presiding over the room. Crowned in brown, black, blonde, and purple locks, each one could be a new identity, a different life.
On her dresser are various items I purchased over the months in helpless attempts to be useful: anti-nausea wrist bands, thickening powder for the liquids she had trouble swallowing, a trite, mass-produced driftwood sign that says in six different fonts:
“Always remember you are braver than you believe / Stronger than you seem,” etc.
I hope it brought her any kind of comfort.
The modest twin bed still carries her outline in its wrinkles, multiple long pillows smushed and Tetrised into new formations as she tossed throughout the night. I spent many nights sleeping sideways on that bed. On one of them, I snapped at her. I had work the next morning and I’d been awake all night. She’d been sobbing in pain for hours, coughing, gasping for air. I told her she was being too loud, that I needed to sleep. The words were naked and ugly. She stared at me and went silent, suppressing her hacking cough until she couldn’t.
Fuck, fuck.
I immediately apologized but I couldn’t make her forget it. Like she could just die more quietly if she’d really made an effort. Those were among the last words I ever said to her. (The actual last words were this text: “Same as yesterday or worse?”)
Even though it’s only Jack in the room with me, I resist the movie-cliché urge to smell her clothes and crumple into the bed crying.
We’re on a mission, after all.
“What about this one?” Jack holds up a sequined black dress.
I’m actually not sure if the dead have to wear black to their own funerals. Probably not sequins though.
Her closet contains contradictions and multitudes: lime green streetwear sweaters, evening gowns, and a hot pink Moncler jacket she hunted down at a sample sale.
I turn to Google and the top article, “Dressing the Deceased,” comes up. The article says to avoid sheer or lace material that may show sutures underneath. The thought of needles threading in and out of her skin makes me sick.
I set aside a simple navy dress.
We comb bins and drawers, unfolding plastic-wrapped clothes she was saving for a special occasion. I see the printed itinerary for her trip to Iceland—the flight, the booking for the Blue Lagoon, all canceled. She was a natural planner in all things, from travel to work to elaborate dinner menus.
Of course this time was no different. Amidst heaps of sweaters and tops, lies, traditions, and rituals, I remember a message she sent me last year.
I pull up my phone and search the keywords in my texts.
“To take with me,” she wrote.
She sent a series of photos.
Three scarves. Leopard print and striped. Gray cashmere. The silk Hermès scarf I agonized over finding her—golden yellow and cobalt with chain and scroll motifs. She had bragged to all her friends about it: “My son got me expensive.” In her mind, it was almost too precious to wear out. I insisted she wear it to my birthday dinner.
“Scarf I like to take,” she wrote.
Two dresses—one in floral blue lace, one a red gown in a garment bag.
“Dress I like to take.”
A black-and-white knit Chanel shawl.
“Shawl I like. Please save these pics for future reference.”
In the text exchange, I asked “What do you mean, to take?” I’d already known the answer, but the words still folded me in half.
“Bury with me.”
I tried to reassure her that wouldn’t happen. Not for a long, long, long, long time.
Nine months later, I stand adrift in her room. Tasked with a scavenger hunt.
Selfishly, I wanted guidance. What did a life lived teach you? Raised on TV and movies, I’d always expected wise words from the dying that I could carry forward, a beautiful, bittersweet speech to take us home before the credits. I didn’t get life advice. But I did get very specific instructions.
We rifle through drawers, boxes under her bed, and random suitcases.
And with a click, we open the suitcase right by the doorway.
Everything she’d texted me about was here, folded neatly. She had already packed to go.
Go where? My agnostic brain gets briefly existential about that eternal question. In our long search, Jack and I pictured my mother’s frustrated apparition knocking over the suitcase to tell us, “It’s right here.”
Frank checks in as we wrap up our search, engulfing the doorframe.
The clothes are picked out, we tell him. All that’s left are the shoes.
“Shoes?” he says.
With a spring in his heavy step, Frank leads us to his bedroom. His father follows suit.
There, rows and rows of them: sneakers, leather pumps, strappy sandals, stilettos, ankle boots. Some of them still in their boxes, others faded at the insole. A jewel green pair of heels catches my eye and Frank lights up in his thick Brooklyn accent.
“Those were her favorite. She always wore those for date night.”
I’m not a fan of Frank, but I can tell how much he loved her when he says this, even when my mom had started to feel smothered and even betrayed by him. The moments I saw of them, they bantered. They did silly little voices with each other and had their own language.
Frank’s father chimes in.
“Oh, those are real good ones. The black ones over there are good, too.”
Four men standing around a dead woman’s shoes deciding on the final pair she’ll wear. I’ll process the absurdity later. We go with the green.
As Jack and I pack up, we hear my mom’s cough slice through the air.
It’s coming from the living room.
We walk over to Gucci’s cage. She had taken to parroting my mother’s voice, usually cheerful greetings: “Gucci girl! Gucci girl!” Those greetings became weaker and more strained over time.
And here it is, unmistakable as ever. The echo of my mother tinged in Gothic horror. Gucci’s pinhole pupils blacken as she bobs her head, the feathers on her neck rippling. The cough means nothing to this bird. Just a series of vibrations in her imitative repertoire.
I want to stay and keep listening. I want to hold the sound until there’s nothing left.
But we have to go. We have more to do before the funeral.
In a corner shop on Mulberry Street, we buy joss paper and other offerings to burn for my mother as part of an ancestral tradition. When my grandparents died, it was explained to me that this “spirit money” would go to them in heaven once burned—an arsonist’s concept of a wire. My uncles would joke that they’d haunt us if we didn’t burn enough. Printed on the symbolic currency are the words “Hell Bank Note,” which I’ve always found odd. Maybe a mistranslation. The store also sells papier-mâché iPhones (to scale), paper Lamborghinis, and paper mansions (not to scale) to burn as offerings. I’m tickled by the idea of “Hell” having cell service and the idea of the paper mansion not scaling up in the fiery transfer, my grandparents confused as to why we sent them a dollhouse.
When I was younger, I asked my dad, “So people still need money in heaven? If your family loves you enough to burn money, you’re rich, but if not, you end up poor?”
I wasn’t satisfied enough with his response to remember it. We fanned out fake bills and tossed them into a bin of fire, the heat licking at our hands, smoke and black confetti dancing into the sky.
Right now, I need to believe in whatever metaphysical transfer system can deliver the items my mom requested to her. The Chanel shawl, the Hermès scarf. Earthly desires. I don’t care. She loved them. They were hers.
I hope she gets to take them with her.
I hope she takes that time we went kayaking in a bioluminescent bay and got left behind by our tour group because we were paddling in circles, a blue glow around us. The cups of Shim Ramyun we’d sneak at midnight. When she’d laugh and sock my arm. The Mother’s Day video I made in Sony Vegas Pro when I was 15—a photo montage synced to “See You Again” by Miley Cyrus. All of it, into the casket.
I don’t remember what we ended up going with for my mother’s outfit.
I think it was a classy blue dress. With the green shoes. I think we (the four men) all liked it.
No one really saw what she wore anyway. The mahogany casket was only open for my father, my mom’s brother, his wife, and me.
Even then, when I walked up to the casket, I didn’t see my mother. I saw the embalming process at work on a body. But she was there in the decisions, the garments folded by her side, the clothes she’d once picked out for living: a trip to a museum, dinner with my dad, a night out with her salsa friends.
Later, the funeral home shut the casket for all other attendees. I made this call; my dad didn’t realize it was an option. Even after my father had arranged both his parents’ funerals at Chun Fook, we were both still new to this.
I gave a eulogy for my mother. Frank gave a eulogy for Tiffany.
After the funeral, we never spoke again. I never got to sort through the rest of her belongings. I picture the dresses still on their hangers and the shoes gathering dust and time.
Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe she took what she needed and left the rest: the pain, the logistics, the stupid thing I said when I was mad. I hope so.
On a Sunday in September, she left with her yellow silk scarf, her dresses in tow, and her trip all mapped out.
In another life, she was a voyager.
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Max Lin is a writer and brand director based in New York City. A former financial crimes investigator turned copywriter, he’s currently working on a graphic novel that blends horror, queer coming-of-age, and superheroes. He finds inspiration in Gothic literature, B-monster movies, and comic books.