A Living Remedy

Nicole Chung was a transracial adoptee raised by a loving, working-class white family in small-town Oregon. A Living Remedy follows the years in which she lost both adoptive parents, first her father to complications of diabetes and kidney disease, then her mother to cancer during the first months of the pandemic, when travel restrictions kept Chung from her side. Living far away and financially stretched, Chung writes about the distance, both physical and economic, that shapes how families care for their dying. The book braids personal grief with a clear-eyed account of a healthcare system that treats access as a privilege, examining how class and geography determined what her parents could receive. It is a memoir of love, anger, and mourning the people who made you.