“The Opposite of Loneliness” is a celebrated essay from a Yale alumnus, whose story and words touched me deeply when I was formulating, commemorating, and reflecting on my Yale experience. It is hard to trace back the bursts of joy and moments of deep intellectual satisfaction that I found abundant throughout the past four years, but the trials and tribulations of life within the cocoon of campus have never felt dispiriting. To some extent, the author’s legacy lives on. Her essay continues to remind generations of students, alumni of Yale or not, that the communal experiences of humanity suffuse our lives and make them worth living.

When I went to college, I had a creeping fear of bereavement. I was fortunate to grow up in the absence of death; I have only attended one funeral, and that was prior to middle school for someone I barely knew. That is not to say that I have not observed death. I have feared death since I was 9, when I watched this Judge Judy-esque legal series by the national agency for TV production in Vietnam and the jury declared the death sentence for a murderer. I saw him collapse onto the ground, receiving a sentence he was unaware he had committed to, being freshly 18. I have feared death since the beginning of sixth grade, when the tales of arresting and trying Lê Văn Luyện made national headlines as the court debated if him killing an entire family in burglarizing their house was eligible for the death sentence if he was underage. I read the well-documented timeline of how the ruckus happened, asking myself if the unassuming child who woke up at the wrong time could have been me. I have feared death since moving to the US, hearing upsetting news about mass shootings (as one happened the day I began writing this piece).

No, I’m not afraid to disappear. The billboard said, “The end is near.” I turned around, there was nothing there. Yeah, I guess, the end is here. (Phoebe Bridgers)

I cannot remember when the first time I felt fearful of death was. It is funny: the earliest draft I thought of for this website was titled “On Death,” but I guess I never came to write it out. My fear of “the end” is nonetheless consistent. I remember struggling to fathom the notion of a Big Bang event from which my being would emerge; the counterpart being, what is the anti-Big Bang, for which everything would be no more? It felt devastating, yet real, how humankind spans an infinitestimal part of time. It overwhelmed by nine-year-old self, tormenting to sleep in a thunderstorm while water splashed through the window of my ten-meter-squared shared bedroom, that no one can prove if I can have an afterlife with the same thoughts, feelings, and observations. That if the world becomes uninhabitable, the lifeless galaxies would just proceed undisturbed in their one-in-a-billion-in-a-billion chance of another manlike species. That in the end of the universe, all that I would have constructed and contributed and defined myself by would mean nothing, and have meant nothing for a long while.

Since I first had these ghastly ruminations, I have grown to accept the mundane bargains of adolescence. I have attempted to separate existentialist concoctions of self-worth from experiential conceptions of a life-worth-living: that is, developing personal ethos of artfulness, culturing, and enlightenment. My journey of building layers of self-confidence is attributable, in no small part, to the lack of life-altering setbacks that I face. This is how I predicted my own infirmity in having not experienced grief. Seated in the certainties of familial longevity, my motions of living were cushioned with promises of how much I could translate my own success into the happiness of my loved ones. My escapade abroad feels just a transient phase; I will soon enough return to my quê, sitting under the towering banana trees or inside the firewood stove hut, having become a grown man yet still under the aegis of my grandparents. My biggest fear was that I would bereave a family member for the first time as a legal adult, while being geographically separated from even attempting to take care of them in their last breaths. I stayed in perpetual melancholia thinking in fear of it.

Wild women don’t get the blues. But I find that lately, I’ve been crying like a tall child. (Mitski)

And it finally happened. I received a phone call from my father thirty minutes after finishing my third week of starting my new job, informing me that he was taking my paternal grandfather back to the countryside. I shouted with glee, asking if he had already made a recovery from his accident; it turned out that his condition worsened by a lot, and my father was feeling inauspicious. As I held my phone ready for the next few hours, I ransacked all the emotions I had hypothesized myself feeling while my parents’ spotty connections could only transmit my grandfather’s labored inhalations through Facebook Messenger. They plugged earphones into my grandfather’s ears, telling me to just keep talking to him, until I could not reach my parents anymore and not for the next two hours. Then my mom called me to the cries of many aunts and uncles around my grandfather’s bed; my sister started texting me again, herself emotionally unable to enter the front porch that everyone was gathered in.

For the next day, I wrangled with my own core (the Vietnamese I was trying to reference is thâm tâm) about what I could have done. There were so many things I could have said, that I just simply fumbled my words and failed to tell him how much I want him to see me be the successful, happy person he wished for. Yet I am stranded in this foreign land, unfamiliar with the rituals that a direct descendent of him should honor as part of our cultural traditions. I did not want to interrupt the proceedings of the funeral, but that left me empty-handed with nothing to do except think of him in my prayers and make some Vietnamese dish I ordered online. In my last year of college, I reintegrated semblances of my cultural upbringing into regular routines. My graduation nón lá with the Vietnamese flag and my Zodiac sign still hangs valiantly in my new room. But none of this felt like they could amount to anything capable of atoning for my ironic absence.

If I could throw my arms around you for just another day, maybe it’d feel like the first time. Now that you’re away, I’ll just spend my life not knowing how it’d feel to… (Japanese Breakfast)

In the hours and days that succeeded, I found myself strangely speeding through the stages of grief. By the time I had seen the official notice of death customary to my grandfather (which is something most people fill out and publicize right away), I had already felt in my acceptance phase. Perhaps I was warmed by the fact that all of my relatives and their family quickly congregated around him in his house as his conditions aggravated overnight. Perhaps my mind was soothed by the teary laments that muffled the sounds of the calls even long after his burial. Perhaps it was through the tales that my mother told, of the rains clearing up just for the fifteen minutes of our family entourage bringing him to the graveyard, of the fuschia heavenly winds that she, my grandmother, and all of my father’s siblings felt as they stood in front of his picture, and of the relieved grin that my grandmother finally let out, seeing my grandfather’s face much less sickly and believing his soul had flown to the perch of peace. My sister insisted that he passed away at 11:11, which my parents lended themselves to agreeing. I accepted that even with a death no one foresaw, my grandfather spent his last moments inundated with the love that could only be described in contradistinction with any continuation of pain, misery, or restlessness. I felt ascertained that he reached the end of loneliness.

All of my grandparents had led lives unimaginable. My grandfather raised six kids in the heights of war, having not finished elementary school. All his children were sent away to different towns as their own did not have more than fifth grade. His heart defect was supposed to defeat him thirty years ago, and ever since he had not weighed more than forty kilograms. Every year, when I went back to my paternal grandparents’ house for Lunar New Year, I would visit his siblings’ children and all the people that hosted his own children as they became educated, and hear their own stories of the courage it took for Vietnamese people of that generation to survive famine, poverty, and sickness. My grandparents’ twenties were colonized by the French; my parents’ twenties were spent on pouches of rice they were rationed away from their deeply agriculture-based hometown, scarred by the lingering effects of Agent Orange. I learned from my parents, who learned from my grandparents, to be frugal with the money I own but extravagant with the affection I spread. It is hard to attain the ideals at the opposite end of loneliness when there is an incessant onslaught of practical, tactical, and philosophical conundrums that are requisitioned for the modern society. Though I cannot rest in the comfort of my grandparents’ always being there for me on this Earth, I can only try to lead a life as fulfilling as they did.

Half of us chasin’ fountains of youth and it’s in the present now. (SZA)