Titasiri
For my Mother
This post isn’t about cancer. It’s about my mother, Titasiri.
I will post another medical update in a few days. But these pieces were weighing heavy on me, over the last few weeks.
My siblings and I each had our own complicated relationship with her. Yet we all feel the ache of her absence. We miss her deeply.
Lately, I’ve been going through old letters, photographs, and replaying fragments of our conversations. In that process, I started writing about her life, not just as we experienced it, but as she lived it. Her choices, her struggles, the reasons behind the things she did.
With the blessing of my siblings and my father, I’ll be sharing parts of our story, pieces of our family’s more intimate history.
Because I want you to meet her.
To understand her.
To see the strength, beauty, and sometimes the heartbreak that shaped the woman we called Mom.
I miss her.
I love her.
This is for her.
Part 1 - She Stood Young
Born beneath the echo of sirens,
in a land already tired of smoke,
she came into the world
between the pages of conflict,
a proper Thai daughter
of two faiths and two fires.
Her mother, a devout Thai Buddhist,
lit incense with prayers and silence,
believing in karma, rebirth,
and the strength of enduring.
Her father, Lao by blood and Catholic by baptism,
taught by French missionaries
and trained by war.
A proud paratrooper,
he leapt through clouds over Vientiane,
a soldier who learned from the Europeans and later the Americans,
how to fall, and how to stand again.
He served with discipline,
with quiet pride,
and dreamed of peace
he would never see.
She stood young,
too young to understand the words,
but old enough to feel them break the room.
Her brother’s hand, small and warm in hers,
anchored them both as the door opened.
A man stood there,
crisp in uniform,
holding something far too heavy
for such a thin envelope.
She watched her mother open it,
watched the color drain from her face
as if the paper had stolen it.
Watched her knees buckle,
watched a sound leave her mother’s mouth that no child should ever hear.
She didn’t cry.
Not then.
She just held her brother tighter,
as if her tiny grip
could keep the world from falling apart.
In that silence,
not the quiet of peace,
but the quiet that follows devastation,
she learned something
about how love ends
and how loss begins.
Her father fell from the sky,
not like a hero, not like the stories.
The parachute didn’t open.
Gravity did what grief always does:
pulled everything down.
She watched her mother
pick through wreckage,
not just of metal and fabric,
but of love.
What was left was never whole,
never truly buried.
Grief became the language they breathed,
a silent hymn hummed between chores,
between bedtime stories too short
and prayers too long.
Her mother never remarried,
not out of stubbornness,
but because some hearts stay married to ghosts.
There were days when laughter slipped in like sunlight through boarded windows;
brief, golden, almost too bright to trust.
Even then, she stood watchful,
as if joy itself might vanish
without warning.
She learned to fold pain
like laundry, neatly, daily,
tucked into drawers
only she could open.
Learned to mother her brother
before she learned to spell her name.
On nights when the world
went still in all the wrong ways,
when even the creak of the floorboards
sounded like sorrow’s footsteps,
she lay wide-eyed beneath a ceiling
that never promised anything back.
The weight of absence
pressed against her chest,
not loud,
but steady,
a second heartbeat made of ache.
She would hold her breath,
trying not to wake her brother,
trying not to let the sadness spill.
In those quiet wars of the soul,
when the past curled up beside her,
she would close her eyes
and,
pause,
a breath.
whisper into the dark:
“There will be joy.
Better has to come.”
Though no one ever answered,
the whisper stayed,
a thread she held onto
when everything else frayed.
A quiet vow made in the dark, by the girl who’d already lost too much,
and to the woman she still hoped to become.
Somehow,
bit by bit,
she grew around the ache,
like roots curling through broken stone,
like light that finds a way in
through the smallest crack.
Not because the sorrow left her.
But because she learned to carry it
without letting it carry her away.
Some aches never leave a soul.
Some lives seem forever shaped
by that first splinter of loss.
For her, that grief,
it became a part of her.
She just learned to wear it well,
hiding it behind perfect smiles
and the slight, practiced nods
that helped her survive the day.
“There will be joy.
Better has to come.”
Part 2 - The Fire She Carried
Barely a woman now,
her hair pinned high,
her smile practiced
but her heart still learning.
Dances and balls blurred together,
but that night,
he stood across the room.
Weathered by war,
lean, serious,
eyes full of sadness
and skies.
Blue as the sky her father fell through.
He spoke differently,
Southern vowels
worn smooth by northern polish.
She listened.
She loved him.
Their marriage came fast,
chased by missed monthly appointments and whispered futures.
A quick trip to Hong Kong,
a city of lights
to mark a new life.
Seven months later,
the fruit of that fire arrived.
A boy, loud and strong,
born with a full head of black hair
that made nurses laugh.
They placed a bow on his head,
the only baby with hair that week.
The sky soldier scowled at the bow.
She beamed.
He brought laughter back to her world,
the soldier did.
Even with grief still sleeping in the corners,
she felt joy slip in again.
But joy was never simple.
The decision was made without her.
Colorado.
Snow so deep it swallowed the roads.
Missouri,
Virginia,
then California.
Each place colder
in ways she couldn’t name.
Along the way,
his family softened to her.
They called her Tuk,
like the tiny cars back in Krungthep.
Not her name,
but close enough for love.
Close enough for them.
She loved them, they brought her joy and happiness.
Letters home came slower now.
Postcards tucked in drawers.
Voices she missed became shadows in memory.
Her Mother resigned her life to the Buddha,
Vow of silence,
Forever disappeared from her life.
Her brother would move to Switzerland for his studies.
Then,
another child.
This time, a daughter.
Born beneath heavy clouds
and sharp hills,
where the Ozarks rose like sleeping beasts
and the wind carried the scent
of woodsmoke and wildflowers.
She came into the world
with eyes like polished stone,
and a will that matched
the tangled woods outside their door.
Even as a newborn,
there was something untamed in her,
a storm held gently in soft limbs.
Her cries echoed
like whippoorwills at dusk,
loud, clear,
insistent.
The fire hadn’t skipped a generation.
It had simply found a new voice.
Her children grew like roots
tangled together,
tight, loyal,
fiercely close.
She was wild.
All motion and questions,
barefoot and bold.
Dancing in creeks,
arguing with wind,
climbing anything taller than her fears.
Her brother,
older, quiet,
full of questions he never asked out loud.
He watched more than he spoke,
studied the world from doorways and corners,
where people didn’t always notice him watching.
He learned early
that silence could be powerful,
that you could understand people
by the way they shifted in their chairs,
by the pauses between their words.
He wasn’t timid.
Just careful,
like someone who had seen too much too soon.
He listened with his whole body,
took in more than he let on.
He held emotions the way some hold breath,
deep and long,
releasing only when it was safe to do so.
He learned to read people
the way his sister read wind and sky,
intuitively,
like something remembered
rather than taught.
When she ran ahead,
barefoot and wild,
he was the one who waited,
who carried the water,
who remembered the way back.
He was the thinker.
She was the flame.
He created stories.
She made them.
They were different
as dusk and dawn,
one fading gently,
one arriving in riotous color,
but they met in the middle
and never let go.
They bickered like birds,
but curled close when storms rolled in. He stood between her and anything that might hurt.
She gave him the courage to make the stand.
Their mother watched them,
these two halves of her heart,
and saw in them
a home she had once lost,
now reborn.
Joy has returned,
For now.
Part 3 - Revolution
By twenty,
she was a mother of two.
The TV flickered revolution;
marches, riots,
black and white demands
bleeding into color.
The world was cracking open,
and something inside her cracked, too.
She watched cities rise in protest,
heard voices demanding more,
and felt it echo in her own quiet ache.
She wanted that life,
noisy, bold,
full of flame and freedom.
He did not.
The dutiful soldier.
The one who followed where orders pointed,
who loved her in the way
a man trained for war might love,
guarded, practical, tired.
But the fire in her
would not go quiet.
By twenty-one,
she was a mother still,
But she was free,
No longer a wife,
a woman reinventing herself
in a place that barely knew her name.
Rebel winds tangled in her hair.
She was free.
She found comfort in motion,
in new eyes, new hands,
brief sanctuaries from the ache.
She was pregnant again,
a baby boy she’d never hold.
Nicholas.
The name settled in her bones,
a ghost that whispered
through every quiet moment.
A sorrow without weight,
but with endless shape.
It clung to her shadow.
She never walked free of him.
Not really.
Then,
a sailor.
Gentle.
Laughter in his voice.
Love like warm rain
instead of wildfire.
She tried to believe.
Tried to stay.
A new child came,
a daughter born into brightness,
her hair a lighter brown
like sun-warmed wood,
Her eyes wide, curious.
The two older children gathered around her like moons to a small sun.
She became their reason,
their steady joy
in a house that often felt too quiet,
too dim.
She laughed before she spoke,
a bright, bubbling sound
that filled the quiet corners of their days.
When she began to talk,
every word felt like a promise.
She learned to walk
by following her siblings’ footsteps,
tiny hands reaching for theirs,
knowing they would always catch her.
Her sister made her brave, fierce, and strong,
her brother taught her gentleness,
how to listen with her whole heart,
how to sit in stillness and feel loved.
To her, the world was safe
because they were always near,
a circle of devotion
she never had to earn.
But their mother,
she remained restless.
Searching,
always searching
for a love she'd dreamed
into impossibility.
The world was changing again,
and so was she.
The wind of the revolution called out to her.
One day,
without rage,
without warning,
she left.
In search of a feeling
she couldn't name,
a warmth she had only
ever imagined.
She left behind her loves,
the children who bore her eyes,
her fire,
her fragility.
She left them
not because she didn’t love them,
but because love
was never enough
to quiet the storm
in her chest.
The siblings were soon scattered.
Divided by time,
by households,
by the slow erosion
of what once tethered them.
Months passed.
Then years.
They became guests in one another’s lives,
reunited only when the winds of change blew just right.
Still, for a while,
life in Yuma bloomed.
The children and their Mom were reunited.
Hot sun,
cheap rent,
moments of peace like desert flowers,
short-lived but brilliant.
The boy, ever hopeful,
clung to small joys.
A room he didn’t have to share.
A paper route to pay for his comics,
And then,
a miracle:
Star Wars heroes,
right there in the hotel lobby, where his mother worked.
He believed again,
in magic,
in possibility,
in her.
But her spirit couldn't stay still.
Not even for them.
The desert was too dry,
too quiet,
too plain.
She needed color, noise, a future she could rewrite.
So she went back to California.
Alone.
A year later,
she called for them.
Expected them to come.
To fall into place
as if nothing had fractured.
But the boy refused.
He’d wanted an anchor.
He was laying a plan to return to his father.
To choose something,
anything,
that wasn’t drifting.
This is how it would be.
From then on.
One foot in her world,
one foot out.
The children learned to read her tides,
to measure love
in how long it lasted
before it moved on.
Then came a word,
bipolar.
She didn’t speak it.
Didn’t claim it.
Didn’t believe in labels.
But they saw it.
They knew.
Not in textbooks,
but in their bones.
They felt it
in her whiplash joy,
in her unreachable despair.
In the way she could disappear
while standing in the same room.
They gave it a name
so they could forgive her.
So they could hold both truths:
that she was broken,
and still beautiful.
That she hurt them,
and still loved them.
That she was the storm,
and still,
somehow,
their shelter.
Part 4 - The Final Flame
The years slipped by like pages turned in a book no one remembers starting.
The boy grew up in the Midwest, learning the language of baseball and snow,
while the girls came of age in Southern California,
where the sun could never quite melt the ache of missing him.
There were phone calls,
some long, some hurried, some tearful,
always ending too soon.
There were a few visits,
awkward hugs at baggage claims,
shared memories trying to bridge the miles.
But this was their life now:
fragmented, stitched together by love
and the ache of what could have been.
The boy, stubborn as ever,
joined the Army.
She begged him not to.
But he was her son, after all,
fire recognizes fire.
The girls found their own paths,
jobs, apartments, small joys,
moments of freedom hard-won.
Time moved fast.
Too fast.
A grandbaby was born.
Then another.
Soon, there were eight,
each with a spark of her in them.
A glance, a laugh, a temper,
a hunger for more.
She saw it.
She smiled.
They made her feel whole,
if only for flashes at a time.
Then came the day.
Cancer.
It crept in quietly,
then roared through her body
like it had been waiting all along.
She fought.
She let them cut and burn and poison the disease.
She joked with nurses.
She cursed the pain.
She swallowed the fear.
But her body,
already a map of storms and survival,
could only hold so much more.
When she died,
it was gentle.
Family surrounded her.
The air thick with love and silence.
The boy was flying to her,
desperate to get there in time.
Somewhere above the Grand Canyon,
his heart broke open.
He knew.
That was the place she’d always said she wanted to take them all.
Together.
The sky held his grief.
We miss her.
All of us.
We are older now,
but we carry her still.
In stories,
in gestures,
in the fire behind our eyes.
She wasn’t perfect.
She was complicated,
beautifully, painfully so.
But she was our mother.
I will always honor the shape she left behind in me.
My God Chris, this is awesome, I never got to meet Tuk, but I know her now. You are a testimony to her strength and fight. I hope this piece imbeds in you her strength and that of everyone who loves you.....you're amazing. Love and prayers, Carole Lynne.
Beautiful tribute to your mother.