Time Passes

There’s a section in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse called “Time Passes.” It’s somewhat jarring compared to what comes before, because the people who filled up the novel’s pages are suddenly mere echoes; their deaths—a mother, a daughter, a son—are relegated to brief parenthetical commentary. Things, once beloved, lose their luster and light. Dust accumulates on surfaces. And, indeed, time passes. Emptied out of human form and filled to the brim with inanimate objects, these pages capture so profoundly the quiet vacancy of death. Take this passage, for instance:

What people had shed and left—a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coasts in wardrobes—those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again. Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its sharp image on the wall opposite. Only the shadows of the trees, flourishing in the wind, made obeisance on the wall, and for a moment darkened the pool in which light reflected itself; or birds, flying, made a soft spot flutter slowly across the bedroom floor.

The absence of these individuals is magnified in relation to the spaces they filled, the clothes they wore, and the objects they used. In this second year of grief, as disbelief has been replaced by the new realities which have taken root, I keep finding myself face to face with the various things that have been emptied out, both literally and metaphorically, things once “filled and animated” by my mother’s presence: a salt container, a sweater, my kitchen. I feel her absence most, however, with my son. While he talks about my mother now more than ever before—he’s always questioning, narrating and elaborating on “Halmi”—I suspect that he does so increasingly as he remembers less and less. She is an absence around which he walks.  He understands that she is, somehow, important, but to him she’s little more than myriad things that she has shed and left behind: this picture, this table, this uncle, this aunt, this mommy. And though, perhaps, his coming-to-be was initially a difficult thing for her to grasp (because it fell so far outside her comfort zone and understanding), watching the two of them love one another became one of my greatest joys and deepest sources of healing. Appropriately, I suppose, watching him reach for memories that are little more than "Halmi" shaped objects has been a source of profound sorrow.

As we find in To the Lighthouse, however, the dead don’t disappear easily. Yes, different rhythms spring up, the house is aired out and new characters move into the foreground while others recede. But those who are absent continue to haunt the pages of the novel; they fill in the gaps; they lie at the center of various visions, motivations and excursions that the remaining characters experience and undertake. And so it is that even in death my mother continues to compel and constrain me. The work of disentangling ourselves from the ties that bind us to one another apparently doesn’t end with death as I naively thought it might. Those cords are still drawn taut across time and within me. And though I am in some ways a little freer to undertake the knotty work of undoing those ties, the loosening and unbinding is still a painful and laborious endeavor. Because, after all, we can’t be chained to the dead forever (Unless, of course, you’re Michonne. Sorry, folks, a little nod to The Walking Dead). Even as we’re loving them, missing them and grieving them, we also move beyond them, like the characters in Woolf’s novel who finally make the trip to the lighthouse sans mother, brother and sister. 

Here, at the end of year two, I understand how people who figure so enormously in our lives slowly become parenthetical; we fill up the hollowed out space (              ) of our lives with these reminders of their human shape. They are too vast to be contained so, paradoxically, we shrink them down to make them manageable and deliverable: “This,” we attempt to say, “is my mother. This is your grandmother. This was a  woman—flawed, difficult, beloved and alive.” As life tumbles by relentlessly, they become the narrative asides, the how-to-explain-this-thing-about-me-or-you, the anecdotal evidence of the ways that we were lashed together and how, inevitably, we find ourselves lapping at the shores of life again—present and past, ebb and flow, together and alone, moored and adrift, “rising and falling with the sea."

Things that Go Bump in the Night

 Can I tell you a secret? I’m afraid of the dark. Growing up, I sometimes felt like we lived at the crossroads of Real-life and Crazy-Town, where most roads actually led to Crazy-Town.* Supernatural beings cluttered our house, and I was aware, from a very young age, of the reach of their collective gazes. I internalized them like some Foucauldian Panopticism. They settled like dust on the furniture, splayed themselves across corners like cobwebs and hovered faintly in the air the way last night’s dinner always hangs half-fragrant, half-rancid on the drapes. At night I shrank from those beings—good or malevolent—as I stared into the shadows that danced around my room taunting me.

*If there were a graphic, it would look something like this:

We moved every three or four years because my dad was in the military, and each time, I hoped that they’d be left behind. My mom was, after all, a masterful packer and purger; she had to be with all of the moving. Somehow, though, those “spirits” seemed to follow us from house to house. If we argued on Sunday morning while our family prepared to go to church, it was always the “devil” intervening and staunching our joy in the process. On the other hand, whenever something good happened in our lives, whenever convenience and chance collided to produce some unforeseen outcome, it was always through the hand of God or the Holy Spirit. Wherever I turned, the supernatural world orchestrated our daily lives and decided our eternal fates.

It’s no surprise, then, that when we argued or when I took a position my mother found problematic, she leapt to demon possession. She didn’t mean to be cruel. She actually believed in the possibility. “Did you see that in her eyes?” she’d ask my dad in a heated moment between us. And in the midst of an argument I’d think, frantically, “What? What did she see?” Terrified, I’d scan my outsides and take stock of my insides, trying to ascertain what it was, exactly, that she had seen.

Later that night she would lay prostrate across my body, deadweight, her hot tears scalding salty tracks along my arm. When she left, I’d trace the length of them and count them in the lines—those lines of self-loathing and fear—that I’d carved into myself. In those moments with her, I held myself perfectly still and tried to take slow oceanic breaths, even though I was terrified, hoping she would think I was asleep. She prayed over me in Korean, demanding that the unclean spirits leave my body, seeking mercy for my soul and pleading peace for both of us. Perhaps if she’d prayed in English I would have rolled my eyes or laughed or told her to go away. But there was something about the urgency and ferocity of her prayers in Korean, that hard syllabic certainty, that cowed me into silence. Instead, I waited, wondering if that night would be the night that something horrible would exit my body, Exorcist style. Eventually, she’d drag her exhausted and fear-laden body off of mine. Sometimes she’d go off to her own bed, the click of her bedroom door serving as a Pavlovian signal of safety and sleep. Other times she’d return to those household chores that she’d put on pause as she attempted cast out my demons. Often, I’d lie there for hours afterwards, watchful and still, waiting for my body to betray me.  After all, what do you do when the monster you fear most isn’t lurking beneath the bed or skulking around in the closet?

I wrote, in another post, about the productive side of fear. But fear is also, of course, incredibly destructive. It’s a master dissembler. It gives us lies in truth-colored wrappers. It transforms otherwise innocuous shadows into our worst nightmares. It urges us to flee though nothing pursues us. It prompts us to attack when there’s no danger to be found.  Knowing now what I do about my mother and about her own difficult past, I’m able to understand a little better how I might have begun to take the shape of her fears. I became the specter of all her missteps, misfortunes and all her might-have-beens. When she looked at me, she saw all the lies that fear had fed her about herself writ large on my body, and she wanted to save me…from myself, but more importantly perhaps, from becoming her. In the process, however, we became monstrous together. 

In the months that followed my mom’s death and in the midst of all the grief and disorienting chaos, I found that I was terrified again. Even though I don’t really believe in the spirit world, the nighttime hauntings of my childhood stayed with me. I was afraid to be alone in my house, especially at night. I was afraid to sleep. I was afraid to dream.*  Drawing on cultural and religious confirmation, my mother treated dreams as sacred texts. They were signs that she lived by. For me, however, they were just dreams. Fodder for a creative life? Yes. The important symbolic working out of day-to-day glitches and deeper traumas? Sure. But signs and divine/prescient messages? No. So when one of my parents’ congregants told me that she’d dreamed of my mother—they’d met in a stairwell and my mother had assured this woman that she was okay and we shouldn’t worry about her—I was surprised to find that I was pissed. What business did this woman have dreaming about my mother? Then, I was hurt. Why had she visited this woman and not me? I felt instantly foolish because I didn’t even believe in those things, right? There was, I suppose, a small part of me that was still waiting for my mother to be right, for the spirit world to be blown wide open the minute I closed my eyes. If that were true, what other things would I have to accept? And then I just felt relieved that it hadn’t been me who’d had the dream.

*Among the many things my mother passed down to me, one of the most powerful is a rich and vibrant dream life.  I remember my dreams on a weekly and almost daily basis. I’ve learned to slip back into them after waking in order to finish a narrative arc. I’ve discovered that I can change the landscape and rewrite outcomes. I’ve taught myself to fly in moments of danger. I can call up familiar dream worlds again and again.

I’m not sure how I survived the next five or six months. I stopped dreaming altogether. Probably because I stopped reaching REM sleep. I hovered, instead, somewhere in those four stages of NREM sleep, exhausted but safe. But as the one-year anniversary of my mother’s death draws near, I’ve begun to dream of her often and without fear. In my dreams, we are both exposed and remade a hundred times over, not into romanticized selves that we weren’t and would never be, but into selves that we’d forgotten and had begun to be to one another when she died.  

The other night as my son and I looked for the moon before bed (his newest bedtime ritual), the cord from the blinds rustled in the breeze and cast a momentary shadow on the ceiling. Before I processed what it was, my heart began to race and I gasped involuntarily. “What is it, mommy?” my son asked, his voice tight with anxiety.  I made my voice light and easy, “it was only the wind, sweetheart, rustling the strings. It just surprised me; that’s all.” I’m determined that our demons not be his. In these iterations to him—where strings are just strings, chairs are just chairs and shadows are just the product of object and light—the night has begun to take on less terrifying shapes. And in those small pockets of peace, in those moments of relief from the fear has that threatened to terrorize and consume me, I suspect that, after all, I’ve found the thing my mother wanted most for me.

(August 11, 2014)

It’s not my dream. I feel the foreignness as I slide into it, liquid and warm. It’s her dream. Flecks of gold fall from the sky landing on my eyelashes, caressing my cheeks and covering the ground. It glitters. It’s too bright to look anywhere but at her and even she is too much to bear as she shimmers in the mid-day sun. She is me and not me. She is the first face I can recall and the last face I see each night.

 She comes to me across the field and offers me her gift, “this is all my love for you.”

 I take the small, slippery pearl and swallow it whole; it fills up all the wells of longing in me. “Spin me,” I say.

Hands clasped in hers, she sends me soaring—arms outstretched, feet flying behind me. She spins us out of time. I am five. I am ninety. I am fifteen. I am ageless. I am dead. I am born. I am alive. I am all the things I’ll ever be and all the things I never was. And for a moment, together, we are enough. 

Making Space, Redux

I let my son play on the sidewalk by the gate for a little longer than usual and I stood there, the sun warm on my forehead, listening to the chatter of the six or seven Korean women who had gathered in the parking lot. Someone’s mother, a grandmother, walked back and forth along the sidewalk carrying a baby on her back, uh-buh-bah style—the way my mother and grandmother carried us as babies, the way I still sometimes carry Bennett as I put him to bed at night. With all the innocence of a presumably inattentive bystander, I listened (only somewhat guiltily) to their conversation the same way I’d eavesdropped on the conversations of my mother and her friends when I was young.

How many secrets had I squirreled away like that? Those tiny morsels of information and juicy bits of gossip had been laid out casually, help-yourself-family-style, because they assumed that we didn’t understand what they were saying. Back then, in those half-Korean/half-American circles, most of our mothers raised us in the languages of our fathers. Perhaps it was easier. Perhaps English was still a coveted enough tongue to compel them to subjugate their own. Perhaps they felt their immigrant status too acutely in the way others strained to understand them through their accents. Perhaps speaking English at home provided them the practice that they needed in a low-stakes environment. Whatever the case, we spoke predominantly English in our homes.

But as I’ve mentioned in other posts, I spent my early years with my grandmother who only spoke Korean. Since she was one of our primary caregivers for many years, I was forced to internalize the language. I remember driving my mom insane with my incessant questions: “mommy, how do you say ‘towel’ in Korean? How do you say ‘thermometer?’ How do you say ‘spend the night at my friend’s house?’ How do you say ‘go to the park?’” That last one was prompted by a situation that had landed me in hot water. I’d gone to the park down the street one afternoon after informing my grandmother (in English) of my plans. I was four or five at the time and my mother was away for a day or two with church duties. Some time later, as I was hanging upside down from the monkey bars, my uncle arrived. He was red-faced and roaring. “You are NEVER,” he bellowed, “allowed to leave the house without telling an adult where you are going.” My grandmother had called to tell him I was missing, though she’d probably called him more out of irritation than concern (this was before people were actually arrested for letting their children walk down the street alone). “But I did tell her,” I whined, feeling the injustice of the situation. “Well,” he yelled, “she didn’t understand! Next time, draw her a picture!” After that, I learned from necessity as much as curiosity.

Standing there beside those women, I felt all the summers of my childhood swelling up around me like deep pools of memory and longing. I’ve written about nostalgia in other posts (here, for instance), but the feeling that washed over me, that particular brand of homesickness, was less about a place/time and more about “fit.” In my childhood, I’d passed easily between languages and between cultures. My mother always served as a kind of entry point to those small clubs of belonging, those small communities of women who gathered in parking lots and coffee shops, who frequented the same businesses together with a kind of devotion and loyalty that rivaled their religious fervor. They will make or break a business with their praise and derision. “This one, not that one,” someone will say and they will all change course together.  “Just wait,” I told a friend months ago when my son’s daycare only had a couple of Korean families, “once the word gets out, you’ll be inundated with Korean kids.” And there they were.

One of those families has a daughter in my son’s class. At our last class gathering, they stood quietly to the side. I made my way over to them to ask them how their daughter was acclimating. “She loves it here,” the mom told me, “every morning she wakes up and says that we need to hurry up and go see her seong-saeng-nim.” She translated, “ah…that means teacher in Korean.” “Yes,” I replied, “my mom….” I’d started to say the phrase, “my mom is Korean” (in Korean) as I had so many times before. But I stopped. I realized that I didn’t know how to say, “my mom was Korean.” Past tense. I should have said, instead, “I’m half Korean,” but in the moment, I floundered. I finished in English, “my mom was Korean, but she passed away last year.” I rushed through the moment and quickly went on to tell her about the morning before, when I’d spoken Korean to her daughter. Her daughter had been walking away when she realized, mid-stride, that someone had spoken her first language to her and she returned wide-eyed to give me a closer look. We laughed and her mother said, “she must have been surprised to find someone speaking her language who doesn’t look Korean.” I know. Pull your jaws off the floor. But yes, this happens quite often. Korean people don’t always read me as “Korean.” They see whiteness. And “white” people see me as “Asian” (or American Indian, Latina, etc.). It all depends on who’s doing the seeing.Without my mother, we—my siblings and I—are three “other-ish” looking kids with a white guy in tow. My mother made sense of us; she provided our papers and credentials for entry into that other world, into those other parts of ourselves.  Now, I often feel like a “foreigner” in all the spaces of my life. I find myself moving uncomfortably through situations that once felt easy. After all, she’s no longer around to bear the burden of our difference.

When life pulls the rug out from under us, we have a tendency to focus on what we’ve lost, to dwell on the bruises from the fall. Sometimes, however, if we take a minute to look beyond those things, we unearth long-forgotten hardwood floors, or kitschy tile made chic again by time, or maybe we find the hideous linoleum that reminds us why we bought the rug in the first place. Whatever we find, that rediscovery has the potential to make novelties of old things. My mother’s death has, in so many strange ways, made the world new for me. But it’s not only the world that has been made new; I’ve unearthed uncharted territory in myself as well. I’ve come to understand how much of my self-narrative has depended on that between-ness.

Lately, I feel myself grasping for the vestiges of that feeling, that comfort of being nestled effortlessly between those parts of myself and between cultures with my mother at the center. That longing has manifested itself in intense cravings for all the foods of my youth. For the cold rice drink (shikhye) that my mother would give us on special occasions when people came over for lunch. For rice mixed with water, the gruel of my early childhood, served with an array of banchan. For green onion pancakes (pajeon) with cilantro and fish/lemon dipping sauce. For Omelet rice (omurice).  For, oh god, delicious noodles in black bean sauce (jjajang myeon). For those chewy pink candies wrapped in rice paper. For weird shrimp crackers (Saewookkang). For Korean moonpies, (Chocopie). And, of course, for Pepero.* Sure, I can make a lot of this at home and I can find the rest at one of the three Korean markets in town, but most of these things never taste quite the same as they did back then. The tastebuds of my childhood—that hadn’t yet learned to love truffle oil and brie, that considered Red #40 and Blue #1 essential to making food more compelling and tasty—have left me perpetually wanting. Moreover, my mother’s death has left me endlessly in search of her distinct and refined notes in those dishes that I haven’t been able to discover elsewhere or replicate exactly on my own. Some things live only in the past.

*This little treat even has its own day. Supposedly, at its inception, people gave boxes of Pepero to those they loved with wishes for growing “taller and thinner, like Pepero.” Insert your own wide-eyed emoticon. Only in Korea, ya’ll. Weirdest marketing scheme ever, right? At some point Pepero day became a kind of Valentines-esque observance on November 11. Any Korean friends out there want to comment about whether or not this is still observed?

Tomorrow, my mother would have turned 59. By way of grieving or celebrating (I’m not sure which), I’ve decided to remake the room that I made for my mother to die in. I’ll give it a fresh coat of paint. I’ll buy new bedding. Maybe I’ll buy a new rug. Maybe I’ll learn the past tense. Maybe I’ll go buy all the things that I’m craving just in case there’s some latent magic to be found in the bounty. Maybe I’ll say hello to those women one morning as I walk by. Who knows? In any case, I’m making space again. This time, however, it’s for all of the things that we will be after and because of my mother, rather than all of the things that we won’t be without her. 

Ashes to Ashes...

I’m exhausted. No, I’m whatever lies beyond exhausted. Last week was brutal and insanely busy. I returned late Monday afternoon and was back at work by 7am on Tuesday--jetlagged, heartsick and overwhelmed. In Korea, I was surrounded by people 24/7, literally. And since I returned, I’ve been inundated with students and all of the catch-up that comes with being away for a week. So there really hasn’t been a moment for me to catch my breath, let alone to process or to really even think about grieving. Sure, I wrote the last blog post and I even wrote up the second part of the “carnival of grief” on the plane ride home, but it just felt…flat. It’s not what I want to say. But I don’t know what I do want to say. There are moments that a thought or a memory springs to mind. The swell of emotion threatens, for a moment, to pull me under.

In Hawaii, 1986

But I keep forcing it back, pushing it down because I don’t have time to feel; I don’t have time to grieve. My days are so full of things that have to be done that I can scarcely find a minute to just be. Even now, writing this, I know I’ll pay for the time spent not working when I have to wake up even earlier to get it all done tomorrow.  But I can’t shake the feeling that I want to say something—something about how I loved my mother, something to honor her memory, something to fill the space that she once occupied.

Leaving Korea was harder this time around. I’ve seen my parents more in the past few years since Bennett was born, but before that we went as long as 2 years without seeing each other in person. Each time I boarded that plane or sent them away, I was always struck by a sense of panic that it might be the last time I saw my mother.  This time, of course, it became a reality. I’ll never see her again. So I’m not sure why it was so hard to leave. She’s no more there, than here. Not really, anyway. But it felt like my last clear connection to her—surrounded by people who had been with her in those last few days, but also in the last decade of her life that she has spent there.

I spent time in their house, a house that is still very much my parents’ house, but will be upon a later return not theirs, but my father’s alone. As I went through her things, emptying out wardrobes and drawers so that my dad wouldn’t have to do it alone later, I felt numb. I still can’t quite wrap my heard around the fact that she is gone. Literally, no more than ashes…is that shocking to say? Is it crude? I don’t know.

My mother was cremated. That’s how it’s done in Korea, primarily because of the lack of space. Like so much of the experience there, the cremation process was full of ritual and a kind of unparalleled dignity that we rarely afford to such processes here. After another strange and elaborate affair, when her remains were finally ready, they called us to the viewing room. There, they transferred her bones to a box and proceeded to grind them to ashes. It sounds like a brutal and somewhat gruesome thing to observe, but I was comforted by their attention to detail, by their efficiency and respect.

I’m grateful that she’s no longer suffering and that her body is no longer riddled with disease. Still, parting with her body was one of the hardest parts of the funeral process. Though I understood that there was nothing left of her, that body had still given birth to me and fed me. Those hands had once bathed me and braided my hair. Those arms had lovingly cradled my child in the recent past just as they had once cradled me. That face, her face, had always been the easiest to recall because I’ve known it longest and, perhaps, studied it more than any other in my life except my child’s.

Lately, as I put Bennett to sleep, he takes his little hand and caresses me from my hand, up my arm and neck across my face, all the way to the very top of my head and back down the other side. Sometimes he gazes at my face, and sometimes he rests his forehead against mine. This new little bedtime routine (I’m sure it will shift to something else soon) is so deeply moving. I don’t know why he does it or what he’s thinking, but I’d like to think that it speaks to that way in which one’s parents,for some time at least, not only shape one’s world but are, in fact, the world.

That process of emerging from them, as distinctly other, can be full of wonder and excitement, but it can also be full of sadness, longing and pain. For me, that first separation was long ago and there have been many other forms of separation since, but this final severing of ties is so full of unspeakable longing and sadness. As we put the box containing half of her ashes into the space that they made, under a tree she would have loved, I was paralyzed by anxiety. How do I even begin to describe the finality of that moment? Though I have loved many others after her, I loved her first. I remember vividly the fierceness of my love for her as a child; for me, she was love. As I stood there, I was that child again, and I was consumed by grief. I said my goodbyes there in that lushly wooded area as I’ve said them everyday since—whispering them in the dark, chanting them in my heart and sending them through the airplane’s windows as I watched my mother’s land grow distant through the clouds beneath me: “I love you, I love you, I love you. May you find rest and peace.”

Carnival of Grief, Part One

10/9/13

I wrote the first post for this blog just four months ago on June second, and on October fifth, my mother passed away. Her illness and rapid decline sent us all into a kind of tailspin. She’s always been strong, both in constitution and in spirit; she worked ceaselessly and never seemed to tire or burn out.  She was a force to be reckoned with, a formidable foe. But she was also a champion to and for so many. To watch her mind and body slowly deteriorate over these past few months was heartbreaking and disorienting. When I think of her now, it’s still hard for me to reconcile the woman that she was toward the end with the woman I’ve known all of my life; they remain, in some ways, two separate people. I keep waiting to see my mother—the real one—walk around the corner. And I have to keep reminding myself that the unfathomable present is our new reality. For you, as much as for myself, I’ve tried to keep track of this process, which has proven to be the most exhausting, the most difficult and the strangest thing I’ve experienced yet.

Monday, October 7

We arrived around 7:30 tonight and were picked up by two people from my parents’ church. We understood that my dad, as the widower, had certain funerary obligations to perform. As we drove from Seoul to Suwon, I was struck, as I always am, by the city. Like most big Asian cities, it’s a sleek and shiny thing to behold. Something always rises up in me to meet this place, but this time I felt, acutely, that my link to this place, to a part of myself, had been fractured. Straddling two cultures has never been a simple or easy thing; it means never fully belonging in one place or the other.  Now, it seems, I belong even less to this place where my mother was born and where she died.

I assumed that we would go straight to my parents’ house, but one of the men informed me that we were headed to the mourning center* instead; everyone was waiting for us there. I kind of knew what to expect, but unless you’ve experienced it, there’s no way to really be prepared. We were already exhausted from the trip and way underdressed, but since it’s not our “dominant” culture, they made a lot of exceptions for us throughout this process. We arrived, and two of our friends—my parents always joke that they are their adopted daughters—came out to greet us and bring us to our father. Because we arrived late on Monday night, most of the people had gone home and we weren’t expected to stay long. We said our hellos to the people who remained (some of whom I knew, most of whom I didn’t) and we left shortly thereafter to spend some time alone.

*The mourning centers vary in size. This one was big enough for two different families. They are large buildings, often attached to hospitals and hospices. Each family’s space consists of a receiving area, a large-ish dining area and another room—I’m not sure what it’s called, but my sister named it the "sad room"—where people pay their respects to the person who has passed away and the family. The body is never put on display. Instead, there’s a picture of the loved one and large flower arrangements. As people enter the room, they take off their shoes, select a flower out of the bucket and place it on the table in front of the photograph. The rituals, I assume, vary according to family preference, religion, etc. The family who occupied the front space was Buddhist, while, of course, my parents are Christian. People who visited us mostly prayed, though some sang as well and others stood quietly. And then, of course, the bowing commenced. I’ve never bowed so much in my life. Once we’d bowed, accepted condolences and offered our words of gratitude, we would invite them stay awhile and eat. In Korea, there are two things that people do at every major life event—they eat and they bring envelopes full of money, partially to ease the burden of feeding so many people. This mourning process begins immediately after the person passes away and it lasts for three days. Traditionally, the family remains in the building for the entirety of the three days so as not to miss receiving someone coming to pay their respects.

Tuesday, October 8

I woke up with a feeling of dread. Because today was the third and final day that we would spend at the mourning center, I knew that it was also the day that we would view my mother’s body. Our appointment (you have appointments for EVERYTHING in Korea and they are promptly kept—none of that waiting around business that we do in the U.S.) was at 3pm. We arrived at the mourning center around 9:30 shortly before the 10am service (they held services in the “sad room" twice a day at 10 am and 7pm) and began receiving people—bowing, accepting condolences, offering gratitude, inviting people to eat.* Over the course of those three days, I think upwards of 700 people passed through those doors, some came every day, some stayed throughout the day to help as needed or to simply be present.

*There were people who arrived before us every day and left after us each evening. They prepared food, cleaned up, kept the guest books, counted the money and did anything and everything else that needed to be done. These people were my parents’ friends and church members who took time off from their jobs and worked tirelessly so that we would have little to do or worry about. If you’ve never seen such love and generosity in action, it’s an amazing thing to bear witness to.

As the day wore on, we began to joke that we needed new phrases to say. The old ones already felt chewed up and stale on my tongue. “What else can I say?” I asked my sister and our friend. My comprehension is pretty good, but my speaking ability, not so much. They began throwing out random phrases that sounded good but meant ridiculous things: “They don’t expect you to know Korean anyway, so it doesn’t matter what you say. How about…juchajang?” (Juchajang is the phrase for “parking garage.”) It was one of those moments that probably felt funnier than it was because of the circumstances, but it became a running joke. There were times when I had to stifle the laughter that started to bubble up as I shook someone’s hand or bowed yet again and offered those old phrases while saying to myself, with all the solemnity of the moment, “juchajang.” It was, indeed, a carnival of grief—and we were the sideshow, somehow always a little too westernized in our enactment of these rituals: we chose not to remain in the “sad room” exclusively for the duration of the three days; we laughed too much; we deviated from the customs in small ways that marked our otherness, that signaled our half-belonging. As one woman who has known my parents for several years gripped my sister and began wailing and pounding my sister’s back, I stood by awkwardly. I felt like a character in an Amy Tan novel and, again, I had to hold back my laughter. It’s not that I found her grief funny, exactly, but she seemed more a caricature to me than a real person. It wasn’t a moment of shared grieving, but a display meant to signal her status as someone who knew my parents well-ish and therefore felt my mother’s death more acutely. It’s not that I doubt her affection for my mother, but it just felt excessive and meant to create a kind of spectacle. Whoa.I’m glad these displays were limited. 

When 3pm arrived, I felt completely numb and detached. The director of the hospital escorted us back to the room where they had prepared my mother’s body. He told us that he had taken care of her himself rather than having an attendant perform the job and explained that they had washed her body and wrapped her tightly in a shroud from the neck down. There were others in the building at that time who had been close to my parents and wanted to come back with us. I wanted to say no. I was angry that they couldn’t give us these last moments alone. They’d been there when she passed. They’d had time to see her go and to love her, but I couldn’t say no. My mother’s life stood before me—she’d given her whole self to these people and to others like them. Whatever anger or bitterness I felt, to be ungracious now would be to spit in the face of all of that. So I asked them to give us a few minutes alone before they entered and they complied.

I felt sick and terrified. I wasn’t sure what condition she’d be in, but she looked peaceful, as if she were only asleep. The day’s numbness slipped away, and I felt myself beginning to come undone. I wanted to scream and throw things; I wanted to hurl myself on her body like those Sicilian women I mentioned in my very first post. Instead, I wept silently as I touched her one last time and tried to imagine what my life would look like without her in it. The director began washing her face and finished the shrouding process by wrapping her head with care. I watched as they lifted her body into the box that would carry her body to the crematorium. I wanted to stop them. I wanted more time. But I realized that I would never be ready, not in five minutes or two hours or three days. I wrote her name on the box after they closed it, and then they wrapped it tightly with a long strip of white cloth, creating handholds for the pallbearers to use the following day. Though the rest of this carnival of grief had offered me little comfort, this moment of such careful and elaborate ritual, of such gentle caretaking of her body filled me with such gratitude for this strange and foreign process.

We returned to our duty stations and continued to meet people throughout the day. The transitions were jarring and exhausting. My mother’s family came and spent time with us later in the day and stayed until we left at 10pm. Grand aunts and uncles, cousins and others whose relationships to us were tangled and difficult to decipher. “Isanghe,” they murmured to us, “how strange.” Women in my mother’s family live long lives. How strange that she will be outlived by her own mother who is over 80 (though she is not well now and has some dementia) and nearly all of her maternal aunts. It didn’t take long for them to begin the typical Korean prodding; they wanted to know why I’m not married, whether or not I have a special “man friend,” and they urged me to marry quickly.  It went something like this: “We’re so sorry for your mother. We loved her; she was a good woman. Such a shame you’re not married! We’re going to pray for you to find a husband quickly. Eat. Eat more. EAT! You need to eat. Don’t get fat, though, or you won’t be able to find a good husband. Ah, you remind me of your mother; you have her smile. Such a pretty girl…why aren’t you married?” Welcome to the emotional carousel at the carnival of grief.  

As we drove home that night, my brother and sister were joking about the various things they’d had to cover over to be respectful and appropriate. My sister wore her hair down to conceal the shaved sides of her head. My brother wore long sleeves despite the heat to cover his tattoos. “Well," I said smugly, "I didn’t have to cover over anything…except my whole life, of course.” We all began laughing. My dad laughed the hardest. I think my mom would have found it funny as well. If she were here, she would have been grateful, I think. She would have felt half-justified and half-guilty, but grateful that we complied to save face. I would have been annoyed by all of the dissembling. Maybe we would have sniped at one another, because that’s what we did in these moments. But for tonight, we did those things out of love. And tonight, we laughed.