My mother sewed my graduation dress from the cloth she was buried in — or rather, from the cloth she had bought to be buried in.
She kept it folded at the bottom of her box, a good lace, deep blue, the kind our people save for the day they will lie in state and be seen off well. She had bought it years before, when the doctors first used the word that we learned to say in whispers. So you children will not scatter looking for aso-ebi when I go, she said, practical as always. Everything is ready.
But she did not go when they said she would. She kept not going. And the year I finished university, standing in the parlour in a borrowed gown that did not fit, she looked at me too long, then went to her box.
Mummy, no, I said, when I saw the blue lace in her hands. That is your—
It is cloth, she said. Cloth is for the living. She sat at the old pedal machine, the one that had put us all through school stitch by stitch, and her feet found the rhythm they had known for thirty years. The needle sang. Late into the night I heard it, that steady heartbeat of a sound I had fallen asleep to my whole childhood.
In the morning there was a dress. Deep blue, fitted to me exactly, a small flower embroidered near the heart where no one but I would look for it.
I wore my mother to my graduation, is how I think of it now. She stood in the crowd clapping, alive, in a plain wrapper, while her burial cloth walked across that stage to collect a certificate with her surname on it.
She is gone these two years. We buried her in ordinary white. The blue is spent, she had told me, near the end, smiling. I used it up on a living day. That is how it should be.