I have fantasized during late-night anxiety-spiral ruminations about hacking into the Review Journal and replacing that terrible stilted obituary with anything else because I can’t bear the thought of people looking up or stumbling upon Lisa Yu and learning only that she was a casino dealer and writer who passed away on February 23, 2011. I have written a hundred elegies and now a whole book about my mother, my grief, and it doesn’t feel like enough. In the intervening years, I have looked up guides on writing obituaries and guides on Chinese funeral traditions and read countless books and essays about other people’s losses. Then I feel guilt for the paucity of ways I’ve offered the world to wonder about my mother.

Every time I read an obituary online or a news story about a tragic death or even the inscription of a memorial bench, all of which I do more often than is perhaps normal, I pause to wonder about the deceased and who is left to remember them. Now, years later, I am haunted by the impersonal nature and sheer brevity of my mother’s obituary in the Las Vegas Review Journal. I did not understand that I could do anything else. Though I seem to have erased all but the most traumatic memories surrounding her death, I think I Googled obituaries, and I probably followed a simple template. Besides, now that she was gone, it was time for me to be a proper adult. But my father tasked me with writing my mother’s obituary because I was born and raised in America, and what were my English skills for if not to be my parents’ voice when they needed it. I was all of nineteen, and the only deaths I’d reckoned with up to that point were those of her parents-whom I’d met only once as an infant-and those of my pet guinea pigs. I did not know how to write an obituary when my mother died.

Sample obituaries for mom