A few months after I turned twenty four, I returned to my grandmother’s home in Hilton, New York for the first time since I was fourteen. A refugee of the Cambodian Genocide, she resettled in Rochester in the 1980s and later remarried an American firefighter whose presence has long been controlling and emotionally distant. Though my mother—her only surviving child—has urged her to move to Rhode Island to live with us, my grandmother has remained in Hilton, bound by obligation and isolation.

I’ve mostly known her from afar: brief childhood visits, mailed gifts, and video calls during dinner prep, where she and my mother shift from English to Khmer to tell stories and secrets. I made the trip to Hilton alone, hoping to see her more clearly. The house was the same, but I noticed what I hadn’t before: her quiet grief, expressed through the care she gives to her plants, sewing projects, and memories she arranges throughout her home. In these small acts, I began to understand her as more than my grandmother.