The day after Thanksgiving, my mother called me worried I was going to die.
I had mistakenly told him I had heartburn, so he left me a long voicemail reminding me that my father had heartburn before he died of a heart attack at age 50 while playing racquetball.
He begged me to get a checkup, to do blood tests.
"Did you know you've been getting fat lately?" he said.
I already knew.
His voice began to crack at the end of the message.
I was his only son, and the men in his life used to drop dead without warning, explanation, or farewell.
The day after the 80th birthday of my mother, her partner of over 35 years, a man named Bing (who came after my father) died on a trip to Palm Springs with his friends, drowning alone in a hot tub at night, with hypertension and alcohol as contributing factors.
Bing was like a father to me, but he never imposed himself like TV stepfathers do.
Even after he moved when I was 5, he never disciplined me or gave me fatherly sermons.
Rather, he taught me how to fish in California's Kern River and built me a huge tree house in the backyard.
After Bing's military burial by Marine Corps veterans on a hill outside Bakersfield, my mother asked me to take her to Hawaii to visit her older sister, who lives there with her daughter.
She made a similar trip after my father's death, a trip to paradise to get away from home and, at the same time, be close to people who knew their peers and had stories to tell.
When my mother had explained Bing's death to her neighbors in their 40s, her husband said:
"Isn't it the second one you lose?"
"I wasn't supposed to be the first to die!" she told me before our flight.
"That's why I chose a younger man; He wouldn't do to me what your father did."
That was not the plan, neither for her nor for me.
Bing, who was 73 when she died, had to take care of her, keep the house in good condition and take out the trash.
In the 1960s, my mother and her sisters immigrated to Los Angeles after their native Indonesia, fell into brutal conflict following Dutch decolonization.
My mother had been raised in the belief that a woman's job was to marry well and raise children.
After my father's death, he used to say:
"No one taught me what to do if my husband stretched his leg."
As the only man left in her life, I flew her to Hawaii to heal her pain, and used promises of beaches and diving to convince my husband to come too.
I told him that a vacation was what we needed after so much sadness, and he accepted sweetly.
My aunt lives with my cousin and my cousin's husband in the rainy Hilo area on the Big Island, where all the good hotels were booked, so the three of us ended up sharing a room in a motel with two beds and a troubled air conditioner.
It rained every day.
When we weren't visiting relatives, we stayed in bed eating takeaway and watching TV.
My husband tried to stay in a good mood, but the rain, my grieving mother, and the cramped space were too much.
At night, while I slept, my mother cried for Bing.
I was desperate to make things better.
I felt a pressure in my chest, but I ignored it.
I wanted the healing to begin. this was Hawaii, after all.
So we cut the visit to Hilo short and I rented a condo on the sunny side of the island in Waikoloa.
With our car we passed over the crest of ancient volcanoes and saw how the sunrise made the ocean shine.
Our condo had two bedrooms and enough space to hide from each other, and it was on a golf course where wild turkeys roamed.
That night, we fed them out of our hands and felt some of the Hawaiian magic we had been looking for.
The next day, when we were finally on a white sand beach, strange clouds began to float above us.
They were dark and low and made me want to go somewhere safe.
It turns out that a forest fire had broken out and strong winds were pushing the smoke towards us.
We had a hard time breathing, so we stayed at home watching the Tokyo Olympics.
"I didn't come to Hawaii to watch TV," my husband said on the second day of the fire.
We started arguing.
My mother was in mourning and I felt I couldn't leave her alone.
However, he knew that the trip was not turning out as promised.
Suddenly, our three phones issued an emergency message. The village of Waikoloa, a 15-minute drive away, was being evacuated.
We were told to prepare for a possible evacuation as well.
"Is God punishing me?" my mother said, looking at the smoke.
"Where do we evacuate? To the beach?"
He sighed and went back to the TV, turning up the volume.
My husband came into our bedroom and closed the door.
He said he was going out for a walk, that he didn't mind the smoke and that I had better find something to do other than watch canoe races or horse jumping.
When he left, the pressure in my chest that I had been trying to ignore sharpened and moved to my neck and jaw.
He had felt something similar before, but since Bing's death, the pain had worsened.
I thought it was my heart, but I couldn't tell anyone.
I was there to heal my mother and treat my husband to a romantic Hawaiian adventure.
I lay on the carpet in the bedroom and covered my eyes with my palms.
I concentrated on taking a deep and slow breath until, finally, the pain subsided and I was able to stand up, and join my mother on the couch.
She continually commented on which Olympians she liked and which were braggarts.
It was a familiar rhythm that I remembered from my childhood, the two of us alone watching TV, talking about everything and nothing. Then he said to me:
"Bing wasn't your father, but he loved you like a son. He took care of us as best he could."
"I know, Mom," I replied.
"I know."
The next day, firefighters mastered the situation and evacuation orders were lifted.
We salvaged what we could from our last days and were grateful to be back home.
Weeks later, I went to the doctor.
He told me that my chest pains were mini-panic attacks, but that my heart was fine.
"You have to manage stress better," he told me.
"Walk more, sleep better, maybe try to lose some weight."
I left wondering if he and my mother were talking about me. I thought of my father and Bing, who were gone.
My father's fate had always loomed over me as a warning.
Now Bing's fate warned me not to waste a minute.
It had been sunny and hot at Bing's funeral.
I remember him sweating as a group of people took his coffin out of the hearse.
Although my mother was supposed to return to her seat, she stayed by Bing's coffin after kissing it.
At the funeral there were many of Bing's friends we didn't know:
Fellow fishermen, school and his time in the army.
Without anyone asking, my mother hugged all the mourners who came to pay their respects, as if she knew them.
I approached her as she did so, feeling like an intruder in another family's grief, and was amazed at how my mother vented, crying and talking to so many strangers.
This was also not part of the plan.
My mother had just done it, being as surprised as the rest of us.
"I don't know why I'm here," he said as he held the hand of one of Bing's friends.
"We all loved him so much, and now he's gone, but our love is still here."
Only on reflection did I realize that my panic attacks were born out of my need to control life's calamities and the feeling that I couldn't fix what I couldn't fix.
He loved Bing; I was grieving too, and I had kept the pain at bay by trying to heal the pain of those around me.
But the pain had to come out, and it would be mixed with love, confusion and anger, and that was okay.
After losing the second love of her life, my mother was flooded with grief. Yet there she was, teaching us to cry.
And I had almost missed my lesson.
c.2023 The New York Times Company
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