When you experience grief, that grief will stay with you forever. However, if we do grief right, it will be lighter and different over time. Grief can transform into love eventually. That's what I got from trainings and also from my own experience of grieving my own parents.
My grief for my parents are complicated but changing over time.
I grieve when they died. I grieve my parents’ up-and-down relationship. I grieve back there, and I continue to grieve until now.
My mother passed away in Feb 21, 2011.
16 years pass. I think about her every single day. Our mother-daughter bond was strong by blood.
The bond is more powerful after she passed away.
Before, I loved her because she was my mother, who could do everything for her children. She was my Goddess. She was my absolute truth. She was my solid, and nothing could change that belief.
Now, when I grow older, my love for her grows stronger with clarity.
I developed a love for her as a whole person. The person who made mistakes in life. The person used art and poetry to cope with her lonliness. The person who practiced solitude to live her life with grace, tenderness and humors.
Specifically, I loved her as the whole person who kept the hidden truth in the open diaries and through her arts, quietly waiting to be discovered later.
Last week, I looked at her poem diary again. I have been reading her diaries many times, and continue to find new things in these diaries each time. She wrote poems. Her poems were beautifully sad and depressing. Even when she recorded positive things, I could feel her sadness in each word, each line, and in between the lines.
Loneliness, rain, and crying with the rain were themes woven into her small sketches of quick drawings.
There was a mysterious connection between my mother and me after she died.
The first time I felt that connection was the moment after she passed. I was crying on and off in Davis. I know that she was sick to the point that she refused to take food and water. She knew that her body asked her to go. She told both of my siblings that she did not want to go back to the hospital.
She's gone. I think the moment she stopped breathing and the soul left the body, I felt it. Something like the electric flash touched my heart. The pain was subtle but deep and sharp. I did not know what it was at that moment.
A few minutes later, my brother called my husband to announce that my mother was gone.
That pivotal moment signified the stronger bond that now happened between two different realms of living and non-living. The bond was bridged by connecting soul to soul, where the earthly material did not exist.
Then the bond manifested through dreams and signs.
Dreams invited me back to the darkness of the hallway in Cao Thang. It was very dark, revealing the most difficult time in our family.
Dreams associated with my mother eventually helped me to take care of my past trauma and unsolved problems. Dreams showed me the future. Dreams acted like a warning sign as well.
I started noticing signs and dreams that connected to my mother and helped me in several occasions.
I shared three stories here.
The first story happened in 2019.
I was working on a big project. This was a huge newspaper collage mounted on thick canvas. Layers and layers of newspaper glue on 68 inches by 75 canvas. On top of it, layers of clear gesso were painted on to prepared smooth surface for India ink drawings. It took me 2 years to finish. Periodically, I put it off since the process of ink drawing was perpetually tedious, and I had no deadline pressure to finish this.
One night, sometimes in the beginning of 2019, I had a dream that my mother came over to my studio. She stood out at the door. I had my big drawing on the table. She told me to finish the drawing.
So I did.
A week later, right after I finished that ink drawing, I received an email from Art- Exchange gallery asking for a show in 03/ 2019, right before COVID.
I had my artworks available for that show right on time. The show was unplanned. It happened that I had my ink drawings match the theme of that show. And my mother told me to finish it!
The second dream happened in February 2024.
Sometimes during COVID, I started to have more dreams and recorded them if I remembered. The more I record, the more I remember, and the more dreams come up that make sense.
Therefor, I felt the need to do writing workshops so I can write dreams in English. Two year creative writing program came to mind, which was expensive. Then one more affordable workshop popped up from email. Writing for grief and past trauma. I would get reimbursed through my training funding.
The workshop was 5 week intensive with lectures/ assignments and writings, plus emotional support.
It was heavy and overwhelming assignments that one could not have done on her/himself. The workshop was designed to give each member emotional support and encouragement to go through unexpected feelings/ emotional turmoil. You would never know what happened. After you open the can, unexpected things would come out like crazy, uncontrollably, and unstoppably.
The first assignment was writing your intention. I was home alone. Seattle was rainy, dark, wet, and cold that night.
I did a first draft of my intention. I went to bed and suddenly cried my eyes out the whole night. I could not sleep.
When I set my intention, I opened my can. A flood of sadness, depression, anger, fear, anxiety, and hopelessness came out like a tsunami. I felt drowned in my own tears.
When my body vented out the very last tear drop, I felt exhausted and terrified. I was so relieved that no one was at home.
I slept it off and had a vivid dream.
The dream showed me the scene in Vietnam, not Cao Thang but our current home in Thu Duc.
I saw my mother and me. Each had a sewing machine. One was in upstairs and another one downstairs. Also, I saw my son and one of my best friends inside the house.
I woke up. I wrote a long poem in Vietnamese to record the overwhelming feelings of that night.
I got curious.
Two sewing machines? Back in Vietnam, we only had one.
My dream showed me two. After writing, I slowly solved my own dream riddle.
A sewing machine was a tool for me to work with. Sewing was stitching. In my case, stitching was an act of healing.
Since the wound was old and deep, it would be difficult to open up/ controlled the infected area, clean it thoroughly/ sanitized with rubbing alcohol, air it out to keep it dried/ then sew it back. Medically, this would be a lot of work.
I could not do it myself. So my mother offered another sewing machine/ she offered me extra help to go through this workshop.
The dream gave me a warning sign. This would not be easy and flat. It would be up and down.
Lastly, the dream hinted that I would not be alone. There would be others with me. The setting was not in Cao Thang, but in Thu Duc.
The Thu Duc house was built when we, as a family, were barely out of the dark woods. The house gave me a solid base to lean on when I needed to adventure back to Cao Thang’s dark hallway to find my own truth.
Going back to the house of grief is horrifying and painful. Who wants to do that? Who wants to open the wound and relive the past? And you have to do it alone !!!!
But if not, the old wound would stay there, infected and spread to other parts of the body, I guess.
I stopped crying. I kept going. And I knew that others would help me but I would be alone stepping to my house of grief and took care it myself. My mother's sewing machine would help me with the "sewing back" task only. I still had to do the rest.
I almost gave up on the workshop. Each assignment served as a pill I must take for detox. My body rejected as it cried tears out when processing and facing the truth. My head got hurt. It fought back, demanding me to stop.
My husband told me keep going. Practically, he said, “We already paid for that. Do not waste the money.”
Actually, I survived 5 week boostcamp of writing. I produced 12 essays that helped me process/ open up the wounds / clean them up and be ready to sew them back on. The wound was over 40 years old/ so deep that it would have needed two machines, as my dream’s prediction.
After that workshop, things have become more fluid, opened and transparent. I gained more confidence to continue to write entries in English.
I could reveal my past trauma to others as needed without crying, hurt, or feeling victimized.
I could talk to my sister about things that I could never before.
The day that I revealed my trauma to my sister, I felt liberatingly lighter. The guilt of keeping secrets was relieved. The burden from my heart was gone. My little sister was much stronger than I was. She graciously held the space for both of us. She stepped up with a gentle, sweet, and warm heart to embrace my trauma, her trauma, and our family trauma. We cried and laughed together just to love each other more with clarity.
My sweet sister wrote me a long message saying sorry that she did not know bad things happened to me. In her mind, she felt something was wrong, but not sure what it was. She shared that she also got molested a few times when we lived in Cao Thang as well. My heart squeezed, bleeding into sadness at her disclosure. I cried.
She was solidly resilient. She did not cry. She was my Thu Duc's house that I could lean on when I was weak.
Additionally, by witnessing my past and trauma unfold, my husband gradually opened his childhood trauma and then willingly processed his past.
He was the guy who would never believe in therapy. My healing journey shed light for both of us to heal our old wounds.
Before I moved to the third story, I needed to write this note as follows.
While I do art every day and always have back-to-back/ overlap big and small projects throughout the year, I stopped submitting my artworks for show since I moved to Seattle. I was busy with a job that makes "real" money to support my family’s living. I realized that finding shows was unnecessarily tiring and time-consuming. Art in Seattle is safe.
Art in Seattle is meant to be relaxing/landscape with flowers/ hotel abstract with shapes and pastel colors, drawings that look pretty and harmless. Art in Seattle is not provocative, and absolutely not political. Artworks must be marketable so galleries can sell to support the expensive rents in the city.
My art is not marketable. After a few attempts, I just gave up totally. However, I would show if invited. The art community here knows who I am. Whenever there is a show related to a Vietnamese theme, art for healing, my name will pop up. That's how I managed to have shows here and there.
The third story was about the show I got invited to last year, 2025, with two other male Vietnamese artists.
2025 marked 50 years since the Fall of Sai Gon. Vietnamese artists around the US planned to have a group show to share our own experience of this event.
I have been processing my grief for my own father after the 2024 workshop. Learning to love my father again would take guts, time, and a readiness to go inward.
I brought all of my diaries back to the US. I read each page. I shared with my siblings and a small group of my best friends who know my family when we were in Cao Thang. I clinically diagnosed my past. I realized that I wrote a lot. I have at least 20 diaries/letters plus this blog.
I did a lot of small sketches as my mother did for her diaries. Like her, I did poetry. I would never remember that part of myself where I used to write a lot of poems. Like my mother, my truth stayed hidden and waiting for me to discover it again later.
For this show, I decided to work on three quilts to process my love /grief toward my own father.
I brought my father’s military green blanket to the US, cut it up, and sew back onto a quilt.
Three artists had a whole year to put the show together. We did not see each other much, just one time via Zoom meeting and via email exchange.
The day we planned to install our artworks, I could not be available since I was in Lake Tahoe that weekend. I came to install the artwork myself on Monday.
The gallery dropped some fliers/ invitation cards for me.
This was the first time I saw the card with three names together. I knew other artists' names before. But never seen three of our names all together in the invitation card until that Monday.
I was shocked at first and laughed. I showed it to my husband.
He looked at me," No matter what you do, this is your reality," he said.
Yup, there was a sign.
The realization signaled to me that I would need to continue to tell my mother/my stories. I need to go to the bottom of it. I need to embrace the truth, the pain, the hurt, because it was a part of my life no matter if I liked it or not.
Looking at my mother's drawings, paintings, and poems, I noticed two portraits that stood out.
One was my biological father, Ba Trung. This was the only painting that my mother showcased my father. It is now in the altar of my family.
Another one was Ba Minh, my mother’s boyfriend and the father of my sister.
Both were done in profile portrait style. One on the left, another one on the right.
Also, there are two more sketches that my mother did in the diary.
One after the fight with my father, Ba Trung. I remembered that fight vividly because I witnessed it. And because that was the only fight that turned out violently, as my mother got so mad. She threw stuff toward my father. He left.
She cried. The poem she wrote next to the sketch was beautifully sad, recording her divorce from my father.
This sketch depicted the back of Ba Minh, who had walked away, leaving my mother’s hands either tied/ waved at him, or trying to embrace her grief that she would never have Ba Minh in her life. His silhouette was in the shadow while my mother's hands were in the light. The light showed a way to her truth?
Both sketches revealed my mother’s reality. Both important men in her life either pushed or walked away from her.
This sketch from my mother's diary depicted her own tomb with her inscriptions,
" Artist Thu Thuy Thuy Mua died of love." That was my mother's ultimate truth. She confronted and came in term with this endgame based on the sketch.
As for me, the artist's invitation card revealed my truth. Whenever I process grief related to my father, Ba Minh's relationship with my mother would be there. I cannot do anything about it.
When I grieve my own father, Ba Trung, I did not mention Ba Minh. I never want to mention his name throughout this project. I wanted to focus exclusively to grieve my own father.
Suddenly, the two artists' names align with my name on the invitation card.
Goose bump. Undeniable truth eventually finds its way to me. Again!
The universe keeps sending me messages over time.
That.
I still have to learn to talk about my mother, Ba Trung, and Ba Minh with good intentions, grace, tenderness, and a genuinely warm heart if I want my heart to get to a true healing.
Art is amazing. Art can heal. Art can reveal truth for me. All I have to do is trust the process and come to terms with that truth later.
Writing this entry is my truth, that settled. I feel peace at last for this chapter in my life.
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