When Time Stops Feeling Like a Concept: Grief and Reinvention

My dad and grandmother in Mejía, Arequipa, on October 2, 2024. The root and the branch, smiling together in one frame.

For most of my life, time felt simple: a line I followed, a silent current beneath everything. But after returning to Peru for the fifth time since 2017, when I'd first visited after fifteen years away, it no longer feels abstract. Time presses inward now, settling like sediment in my bones. It’s heavier, more palpable, like a weight that anchors me not just to grief, but to legacy.

Let me explain.

My grandmother Clemencia, my dad's mom, endured a relentless year-long battle with stage four lung cancer — the same illness that claimed her sister Yolanda and half brother Domingo. Her final weeks were steeped in stillness and pain, wrapped in the slow unraveling of an anticipated goodbye. Each day, for one month, we braced ourselves. And when the end finally arrived on a Tuesday afternoon this past June, it did so with a strange blend of sorrow and relief. Because the doctors had been right: she lived almost exactly one year from diagnosis. Yet the death of a matriarch falls like a curtain — tragic and final, even when expected. In her last moments, Ruth and Frances, two of my dad's sisters, held her hands. As they guided her toward the light, he and I stood close, silently watching, waiting for my uncle Rafo and aunt Yamili to arrive.

That evening, the rhythm of life shifted. In an Airbnb in Arequipa, where my dad and some of his siblings had gathered to care for her near better hospitals, her body grew cold. The funeral service we arranged a week earlier eventually arrived and she was gently laid in the casket, placed in the hearse, and prepared to be escorted back home.

Home.

For us, that was Mollendo — her hometown and mine. A small port city in southern Peru where the sea does more than meet the land: it embraces it, bathing the shore with forceful tides that wash up stories of immigrants from long ago — English, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, Jewish, Palestinian — who arrived in the 19th century with hope and labor to build this place. It’s where she built a life, but also where our family’s legacy lingers still, like the salt air of its six beaches. Because Mollendo isn’t just where we come from. It’s where the echoes of my grandfather’s ambition, the weight of his name, and the impact of his entrepreneurial work that helped shape the city remain.

In the hearse that led the way, Ruth sat beside her. My dad and I followed in a separate car while, behind us, family vehicles eventually trailed into a slow procession down the daunting Pan-American Highway — a two-and-a-half-hour stretch between Arequipa and Mollendo, just a sliver of the road that technically runs from Alaska to the end of the world in Argentina's Tierra del Fuego. It's not for the faint of heart: cliffs drop on one side, arid desert plains on the other, massive trucks rumble past with dozens of tons of copper, iron, and minerals. And yet, throughout the drive, I sensed a heavier weight in what we carried. It was more than just a body — it was a lifetime. A whole anthology of stories and lessons, some of which were shared, the rest of which there was not enough time to. That evening, no cargo around us felt heavier than the closed book ahead. Its spine worn with time, its pages written with the weight of a woman’s life.

We arrived in Mollendo deep into the night. What followed were two days filled with memory, reunion, and reverence. The first was a thirteen-hour vigil at her home — a thousand-square-meter, four-story house she had proudly maintained for nearly seven decades. Coffee, pisco, and stories moved through every floor like breath. Some relatives I met for the first time, others I hadn’t seen in years. My family on both sides is immense and scattered, but that night it felt like they had all returned home. Because even with all that space, the house brimmed. Voices rose from living rooms, stairwells, and balconies. Laughter and memory spilled from corners long untouched. Songs from her time — boleros, criollo waltzes, tangos she hummed while cooking — drifted from speakers, wrapping each room in the quiet grace that defined her.

My grandmother was a woman of few words. Her stoicism granted her a certain dignity, but it also built distance and a quiet architecture that shaped the childhoods of her five children. She spoke mostly through presence, ritual, and the elegance of her style. But although emotion wasn’t offered freely, it did live in the margins. In the way she stirred her sauces, folded linens, or in the extra second her eyes lingered saying something she didn’t. That night, as music threaded through the walls, it felt as though she was speaking to us. Not with voice, but with melody. A final conversation carried by the songs of her era. By the songs she loved.

The next day, we gathered at Mollendo’s historic St. Francis of Assisi Church for a traditional Catholic funeral. Incense clung to the pews and the air hung heavy with prayer and ritual. Roses blanketed her casket while silence and solemnity replaced the festive warmth of the night before. At the end of the ceremony, I spoke briefly on behalf of some of her grandchildren, my sister and myself included, to share a few words and honor her memory. The men of the family then took turns carrying her through the church doors, down the steps, and into the streets she had walked so many times. After escorting her across town in a quiet procession, the edge of the city came into view where streets gave way to open ground and black gates. Past them, among gravestones worn by sea wind and time, some names were familiar while others lived only through stories — those of family friends, our cousins, our great-grandparents. And yet, despite the nature of the ground, it felt less like a cemetery and more like a root system, quietly holding the generations that made us, us.

It makes sense, then, that a part of my heart will always remain in Mollendo. It was here that my grandfather Alberto rose and where the Chang family once flourished. The son of a Chilean woman and a Chinese diplomat who met only because he missed his steamship back to China, my grandfather grew up with an unrelenting drive to prove himself. And he did. He built several businesses, became mayor, and made the Chang name known. Charismatic, practical, fearless. For a time, he made Mollendo ours.

But legacy is rarely simple.

At 63, after a heart attack left his heart functioning at 30%, he took less than an hour to choose a lethal injection before gathering his seven children, saying goodbye, and walking away on his own terms. Even in death, the man was decisive.

To older generations of Mollendinos, my grandfather is still a symbol of success. Many assume the Changs continue to thrive because of him, but the truth is more tangled. He died in debt, left a vague will, and split his legacy among seven children from three different relationships. As roots loosened, some family members moved to the U.S. and Europe while others stayed behind to rebuild. Though they have found their own successes — each with a story deserving its own blog post — history echoes.

My dad and his siblings face a second legal battle after discovering my grandmother also left behind a fragmented estate. Family tensions, centered around traces of manipulation, have left them fighting — not just for justice, but to preserve the memory of a woman they loved, and only recently let go.

To support my dad, I stayed in Peru longer than expected for the tedious aftermath that followed the burial. As I sat with him through long silences and meetings, I thought of his childhood friends — boys he once ran barefoot with on Mollendo’s steep hills, reminiscent of San Francisco’s. Some went on to thrive in industries like gastronomy, real estate, and finance, building legacies of their own. Their stories stirred something in me, a genuine curiosity sparked by the fact of legacy in my blood. Could I build something of my own? Could I carry forward the best parts of my grandfather and reshape the rest into something true, something new?

The tumultuousness of the trip led me to reflect on more than just family dysfunction — it made me question what I want to build with my own life. Back in Oakland now, near UC Berkeley where I graduated in 2021, life feels still. I miss Peru, not just the place but its vibrancy and weight of shared history. I wonder where I belong, dream of risk, and am impatient to replant. But at the same time, I know this: no sudden move or rash decision will settle what stirs within me. That work is mine and mine alone.

At almost 29, having left a lucrative finance job, enrolled in a bootcamp I didn't finish, moved on from UX design, and finished a rewarding but brief real estate internship, it’s easy to feel behind. Yet, I’m learning to see these times not as failure, but as the middle part. As the quiet stretch between one life and the next; the raw, unglamorous space where reinvention begins and where I'm forced to confront what truly matters beyond titles, achievements, or the paths I once envisioned.

Lately, that reckoning has gone deeper than career, as I find myself grieving not just lost time or direction, but the passing of my grandmother — and with her, a deeper sense of disconnect. Maybe what I’m really mourning, then, is the distance that began when I left Peru at six. I was raised in another country, in another tongue, far from my people and memories I was just beginning to form. And now, years later, I’m trying to make sense of it all. To rebuild ties with family, to understand the legacy I was born into. To step into adulthood not just with ambition, but with roots.

Before I left Mollendo and closed this chapter of pensive unrest, the image that stayed with me wasn’t just the ocean at dusk, though the vast, cold Pacific always calls. It was Urbanización Arizona, the coastline my grandfather once dreamed of transforming. His final venture: 60,000 square meters of sun and sand, nearly 100 lots etched into the shore, meant to be his legacy in real estate. He risked everything for it. And though that risk contributed to the problems he left behind, my family picked it back up in 2012 to finish what he started. To build something lasting. Something beautiful.

Today, Arizona is more than a development — it’s a living memory. A place where green lawns meet golden sand and white picket fences line sun-warmed streets. Where beach homes echo with laughter, reunion, and the voices of children who don’t yet know the weight of history, only that this place feels like joy. Even the stray dogs have become part of its soul: they nap on porches, guard the community, and somehow belong to everyone.

One of them, Lenin, was brought in by my cousin Pablo before he passed in 2023. Scrappy and sun-colored, Lenin was named — half-jokingly — after the revolutionary for his fierce spirit and stubborn will. But he’s all heart, chasing crabs and gulls like it’s his purpose, refusing to rest while there’s a coastline to explore (unless he catches wind of rotisserie chicken at our beach house, in which case all coastal patrol duties become temporarily suspended). He lives like someone who knows time is precious. And in the way he watches, runs, and stays close, it’s hard not to feel Pablo still there — present, enduring, quietly alive in the rhythm of the place.

And then there’s the sea. The same sea that has watched over our family and friends for generations. The infinite Pacific — cold and untamed — where brave Mollendinos dive even in winter, unafraid of the waves that crash with a kind of sacred fury. Mollendo, after all, didn’t earn its nickname for nothing: Puerto Bravo ("Fierce Port”). A city of strong tides and stronger people, with a coastline carved by resilience, memory, and the unyielding grit of our ancestors, whose courage still runs through us.

So, what will I make of all this — this place, this history, this chapter of pensive unrest?

That I still have time.

Time to move forward like the tides.

Time to build where the foundation cracked.

Time to live in a way that would've made my grandmother proud.

Time to love, fully and fiercely, like the waves of Puerto Bravo.