Lam family’s struggle with grief and guilt
In early spring, nearly 2½ years after Cecilia Lam’s death, her family gathered at her Oakland grave site on Ching Ming, a traditional Chinese holiday to honor the dead.
The sweeping hills of Mountain View Cemetery felt like a park that April day, with children laughing and the scent of incense in the air. Cecilia’s mother, Shut-Fan, and brothers fluffed fresh flowers and placed Cecilia’s favorite foods — crispy pork belly, egg tarts and sticky rice — at her headstone.
Off to the side, Cecilia’s father, Joseph, sat silently. His gaze never left the smiling photo of his daughter on the grave marker. Whenever no one was looking, he’d wipe his eyes.
Ching Ming is less about mourning those who died and more about celebrating their lives and letting them know they are not forgotten. But since Cecilia’s death at the hands of her boyfriend, grief has been a constant cloud over the Lam family. Cecilia was slain at age 35 in her San Francisco apartment after making a series of 911 calls seeking help in October 2014.
The pain felt by the families of domestic violence victims is unique, experts say, with guilt and anger coloring their sadness in ways they’re reluctant to voice. Violence between intimates remains one of the few crimes in which the first reaction is often to question the choices of the victim. Even victims’ families are not exempt from such thinking.
Shut-Fan Lam admits that in moments when she allows herself to get mad, she is focused not on Cecilia’s killer, Cedric “Jay” Young Jr., but on her daughter. Her anger clashes with love and longing. In Cecilia’s childhood room, she has cried out to her: “Daughter, you lied to me! You said you were coming home that weekend. Where are you? I’m still waiting for you. I wait for you every day.”
At her grave site this day, she spoke to her again, in Mandarin: “You knew he was troubled. Why did you stay with him? Why did you think you could fix him?” When the anger fades, guilt takes its place. Why didn’t she come to me and tell me how bad the relationship had become? her mother wonders. Eddie, her younger brother, thinks back to advice he gave his sister in 2012, after Young had physically abused her for the first time. He wonders: Should I have been more forceful? Could I have made her listen?
“Since it’s all happened, my whole family, I feel like everyone is always asking themselves, ‘What could we have done?’ ” said Sunny Lam, the youngest sibling.
The Lams rarely think of Young, the boyfriend who also killed himself. They say there’s not enough room in their hearts for hate. But his suicide complicates their grief. They will never see him brought to justice for her murder, never find the closure the law promises.
Over the years, coping with the loss of Cecilia has gotten easier. But then Sunny will see a girl playing with her little brother, and the grief will wash over him again. Eddie, confronted by a difficult life decision, will wish for the one person he always leaned on. “Nobody can understand,” said their father. Like many Chinese men of a certain generation, Joseph Lam can come off as stern, unsmiling and proud. He has the face of a man forged by a life of hard labor, working as a ship captain in China and then a locksmith in Oakland. But in old family photos, he is a different person, smiling and relaxed as he holds baby Cecilia in his sturdy arms.
His “Ceci” was a rambunctious little girl who would pinch her brother and then run to her “baba” for hugs. His only daughter, she was like him in so many ways, tenacious and unafraid of a challenge.
Joseph tries to think of happy times — the family dinner Cecilia organized for her parents’ 40th wedding anniversary, the day she went back to San Francisco State, the fresh fruit and gifts she’d bring with her whenever she visited.
But he also can’t stop picturing his daughter lying bruised and bloody in the hospital the day she was shot, hooked to beeping machines and barely alive.
“Nobody can understand, unless they’ve gone through it, what it’s like to watch your child dying,” Joseph said. “That feeling is unbearable. And it’s something we have to live with every day for the rest of our lives.”
It’s something Joseph and his family want no other family to feel.
“She who leaves a trail of glitter is never forgotten,” reads the inscription on Cecilia’s headstone. Her friends chose the quote, and her family found it fitting. Even now, when they will visit her grave, they’ll find fresh flowers or candies left by people who loved her.
Maybe speaking up about her death, they hope, will be enough to save someone else’s sister or daughter. Maybe the shine of Cecilia’s glitter will be enough to guide another through the darkness.
“I’ve tried to move on by telling myself that what’s happened has happened,” said Sunny Lam. “You can’t do much about it. But someone else can do something about it, for their loved one. I want people to be aware. You may only have one chance.”