Jolie Phuong Hoang - Three Funerals for My Father: Love, Loss and Escape from Vietnam

I died on June 15, 1985, when I was fifty-nine years old. My death was not natural. I died escaping Vietnam with my wife and my three younger children, hoping to reunite with my six older children who were living in Canada, halfway around the world. I died in the Pacific Ocean, trying to shorten the distance between us all.

My soul arrived at the door of Heaven. I knelt in front of God. Please allow me to postpone my entrance.

God showed me the Book of Heaven. Your name is written right here. It is your time to walk through this door. Hurry, it is about to close.

I begged God, Let me live as a ghost. Let the dead stay with the living. Let my soul stay with my children.

Why would you want more suffering? God asked. In Heaven, you are free of the living, at eternal peace. Give me one good reason to let you live as a ghost.

When I died, I replied, I could still hear my childrens cries. I hear the tears in their hearts. I will do anything for my wife and our children, God. Please, I beg you to let my soul live on as a ghost.

Is my Heaven meaningless to you? Death comes when your physical being can no longer endure pain. It is a relief to be done with your time on earth. It is time for your tired soul to rest. Why would you want to prolong your agony?

God seemed puzzled. It is strange to hear such a request. What can you do for your wife and your children with your helpless soul? Living as a ghost, you will still have your memories but will not be able to talk. You will want to forget, but you will remember. You will feel, but touch will be impossible. You will want to cry but will have no tears. You will be present only to yourself, invisible to the living, caught between life and death.

God paused to listen and heard the anguished cries of my surviving children, my dead children, my wife, my mother, my dead father, my grandchildren, my brothers, my sisters and my friends. God realized that, in death, I was still suffering and stopped lecturing me.

I still cannot accept being taken away from my wife and my children.

Perhaps you need to find the answers on your own. God granted my wish and released my soul.

I rushed to Cn Sn Island, near where the boat sank, to the site where the communist government imprisoned those who tried to escape their own country and were captured at sea. Before the fall of Saigon in 1975, the South Vietnamese government used the island to incarcerate notorious criminals and to torture communists. Many communists or citizens who were accused of being communists were executed or murdered. There were more prisons on this island than homes, more nameless graves than those with tombstones, and many mass graves waiting to be discovered. Cn Sn Island was home to many ghosts of the present and the past. I heard the weary cries of those who had died unjust deaths and those who died fighting to liberate South Vietnam. Their souls longed for the living to come to this island, to discover and collect their corpses. They dreamed of proper burial ceremonies, close to their living families. The spirits of the dead suffered in agony; the living endured in misery.

I found my wife and my two young sons. They were lying on a dirty mat in a filthy cell with many other prisoners. I recognized some of themthey were my fellow escapees. My wife wept silently. My sons tried to comfort their mother even as tears dripped from the corners of their own eyes.

Where is Lan Phng? I asked my wife. Ph and Phn, Father is here. I am right beside you, I screamed, then realized they could not see or hear me. I crumbled to the ground.

Then I heard the familiar voice of our youngest daughter. Father, is that you?

Lan Phng! I hugged her and she wrapped her arms around me. She could feel me. We felt each other. Then I understood that she was just like mea ghost with a confused soul that could not rise to Heaven.

Father, where were you? What happened to us? asked Lan Phng, her voice trembling.

I held her tiny hands. Our souls flew to the place on the sea where the boat had gone down. Our souls sank under the water and found dead bodies still trapped in the hull, other corpses slowly rising to the surface. We saw miserable souls clinging to their lifeless, drifting bodies. We heard the wails of other anguished ghosts, desperately searched for their remains. We avoided the chaos and sat on a piece of debris, our weightless souls floating on angry waves under a dark purple sky.