Life will have to wait (1/29/2002) For Bay design engineer Steve Chen, 43, the most painful personal test came last summer. He had to decide whether to go immediately to his mother's bedside in Japan or take a day or so to get his work in order. The doctors had told him his mother was dying of cancer. They said he probably had a few days, but they were wrong.

``She was already dead,'' Chen says of the day he arrived in Japan. He helped with the funeral and handled the bureaucracy of death. Then he brought his mother's ashes back with him to Cupertino.