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. 

Between the Lines

I was eleven. My mother and I were watching My Girl; she was sitting next to me, sobbing. In case you don’t remember the movie, eleven-year olds Vada (Anna Chlumsky) and Thomas J. (Macaulay Culkin) are best friends. When Vada loses her mood ring, Thomas J. goes back into the woods on his own to find it, unbeknownst to her. In the process, he steps on a hornet’s nest and ends up dying from anaphylaxis. I felt tears sting my eyes when Vada sees Thomas J. in his coffin; she falls apart and begins screaming that he can’t see without his glasses (he lost them in the woods). However, my embarrassment and annoyance at my mom’s emotional response won out.  I sat there dry-eyed and presumably unfeeling.

“What’s wrong with you? It’s okay to cry if you’re sad,” my mom said.

I wanted to ask, “since when?” It wasn’t really a message that rang true. Or, rather, it was only applicable in limited scenarios like this one. She used to tell me what a deeply feeling baby I had been, that I would cry in response to things that moved me, like Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14. I was skeptical.

Instead, I replied, “you can be sad without crying. I don’t really feel like crying.”

“Ai-goo. Don’t be so cold-hearted!” she said, annoyed.

It’s not that I didn’t feel things. Because I did. Deeply. Fiercely. In fact, my feelings were so big that I often found myself terrified that they would consume me, so I swallowed them, instead. But in that moment, I refused to perform my grief for her, as I would eventually refuse to perform so many other things. I wasn’t sure what the response from her would be and I wasn’t sure which would be worse: a rare moment of shared tenderness/intimacy or a knowing and smug, “see, doesn’t that feel better?” So I chose option c—no reaction at all.   

Yet here I am performing my grief for so many of you. Of course, it isn’t a performance, exactly; I write with earnestness and openness. But, and I’ve said this before, these public mediations on my grief often eclipse “feeling” in favor of “intellectualizing.” In those moments when grief threatens to bowl me over, rather than wading through it I find myself detouring around it as I ask myself, “what am I feeling and how can I talk about this?”

Lately, I’ve thought quite a bit about these increasingly public experiences, these communal acts of loving, living and grieving. Social media has infiltrated our daily lives in such a way that we are incessantly managing our public selves. It can be draining and overwhelming; the barrage of information is excessive and invasive. Our world has shifted quickly but imperceptibly over the past few decades as we’ve transitioned from one social media space to another in waves—myspace, facebook, instagram, twitter, youtube, snapchat, etc. After all, it takes no more than a few clicks to land us in brave new worlds. We are awash in a sea of hashtags, selfies and buzzfeed quizzes, bombarded by various forms of activism via social media, perplexed by how we might enforce cyber-bullying laws, tempted by the deceptive impermanence of our feeds, and confounded by the sheer number of things that we can pin but will probably never actually do/make/buy. I’ve become anesthetized to almost everything as, daily, I scroll by heated arguments, make note of people’s vigorous assertions of their religious/political leanings with nothing more than an internal sigh or cringe, and observe other, well…downright craziness. In matter of “likes,” “views” or “searches,” you can skyrocket to stardom or land yourself in infamy.

I guess I’m wondering what it means to give in, to participate in these public and communal experiences via the Internet. Sometimes it feels like the more we say, the less it means. In mere minutes, our feeds will be full of new people saying new things or old people still saying old things. In the former, we move on because there are fresh things to debate/see/ogle. In the latter, we move on because we’re bored or desensitized by the rhetoric stuck on repeat. Or we just block them/hide their feeds. Problem solved. So what? I suppose part of me worries that we’ve lost the ability to be affected and to effect change in ways that rupture, radicalize or reimagine our present. What happens when we forget that these profile pics and handles are attached to real people, with real bodies? What happens when we forget that we aren’t just characters in the various feeds of our lives? I worry that we’ve become so alienated and disconnected from ourselves that we have to find new ways to shake ourselves up—take school shootings, for example. 

The other evening, however, I went with group of thirty-something-year-old moms to the opening of The Fault in Our Stars alongside hordes of fifteen-year old girls. They (yes, the antecedent here is purposely ambiguous) giggled and gasped and heaved huge sighs at all the right moments. And I’ll admit, I got on the bandwagon. One girl behind me resisted for awhile: “why are they laughing? That’s not even funny! Ugh. This is stupid.” But by the time Hazel Grace was reading her eulogy for Augustus Waters at his impromptu funeral rehearsal, the acerbic commentary had given way to sniffles. The movie theater erupted into a massive carnival of grief. Sniffles gave way to outright sobbing. The young girl in front of me was so upset that I worried she might begin to hyperventilate. They were affected.  But were they affecting more feeling than was real? How much of that, I wondered, was performance and how much was genuine? Would they respond in the same way if they were watching the movie on their own. I considered my own dry eyes—I was transported back to that moment on the couch with my mother—would I respond differently if I were alone? The experience was considerably and uncomfortably different from my previous experiences in “sad” or “moving” movies where people sniffled quietly into their tissues.

So why the shift? I have to think that a large part of this can be attributed to a generational and affective shift. Most of those 14-16 year olds have grown up in a world where their public and private lives are increasingly synonymous. It’s a world where elaborate engagements, sorrowful tales of loss, and rage-y rants are the norm. It’s a world of instant access and excess. Big feelings have always been a thing—especially aomong adolescents; I admitted to having them at the start of this piece. Mental illnesses have been around (though the parameters and our understanding continues to evolve). And guns—well they’ve been around, too (I won’t get into this issue now). But the way that we express and experience that coalescing of private and public selves has changed dramatically. The terrain of our affective responses has been altered. I think those shifts have occasionally taken on some really terrifying forms and have manifested in some very troubling ways. But as I think about that moment in the theater, it was more than a performance of mob-mentality or mass hysteria. That eruption of feeling was unnerving because it felt, instead, like a group of public individuals having a hundred uninhibited private moments. That’s decidedly different than a group of private individuals sniffling through their unexpected or unwanted public displays. We get that "have-your-feelings-but-for-god’s-sake-have-them-quietly” thing. We’re okay with that. 

We often talk about social media and the Internet in a negative way: it has changed the way our brains work; it has alienated us from ourselves; it has produced shallow intimacies. But what if we allow ourselves to imagine the way that it has the potential to create deeper (or at least wider-reaching) intimacies? What if we consider the way that it tethers us to one another through and despite ourselves and our differences? Anyone who has ever played an MMRPG (massively multiplayer role-playing game) understands the way the Internet can serve as a space where we can imagine and create worlds together regardless of things that might otherwise divide us. I’m not saying anything new, here. People have talked about and written about these issues of world building better than I can. In my case, in this blog on death and grief, I’ve created a world where my mom is, ironically, most alive. I’ve tried, as much as is possible, not to romanticize but to depict us the way we were—to preserve the heartache and tension and love between us in a way that feels real. And each time you gather with me here, she is reassembled and reanimated. You’ve allowed me these excesses of feeling in ways that you might not have or that I might not have offered, in the flesh.

But the really interesting and beautiful thing is that these things carry over into our real-world interactions. When we meet, those connections that we’ve made via NSPs, ISPs, LANs and individual devices are still open between us. We haven’t quite logged out. It’s a novel kind of intimacy that doesn’t spring from face-to-face interactions but from largely “artificial” and “performative” ones.  Nonetheless, it’s still a version of intimacy. It has preceded many of my real-life interactions with some you and has deepened preexisting relationships with others. What began as an act of “anonymous” or disconnected grieving has served countless times as points of reference, connection and compassion: as I’ve shared with you, so many of you have shared yourselves in return. Somehow, we’ve cut through the code and found a kind of community in these shared stories. We’ve discovered a network that extends beyond the screens of our computers and phones. However soul-deadening the world of social media can sometimes be and however isolating the Internet can sometimes seem, there’s something compelling about the affective transmutation that has sprung up in this reworking of private and public that affirms rather than shuts down communal feeling. I can’t help but imagine the transformative potential--if we’re brave enough to embrace it--that awaits us in this new openness of being. That, my friends, is something radical. 

Potty-talk and Other Regressions

I stood across the lawn from them, squinting in the sun. I was four, which means he would have been two. I only know this because I remember the house that we lived in then. We moved so often that I’ve learned to tell time by the house that we occupied at any given moment. Those houses stand like markers, points of identification around which three or four year clusters of particular experiences, people and places gather in my mind. Barksdale AFB, Louisiana. I watched as my grandmother squatted beside my brother, a faded yellow margarine tub in her hand, and began coaxing him to pee with a rhythmically hissing, “shee, shee, shee.” Potty training the Korean way. As he began to urinate, preening with a kind of princely privilege and pride, I yelled, “ewwwwwww!” My grandmother didn’t look in my direction, but her retort, “YA!” came cracking across the yard like a swat on my retreating rear. I turned my head to stick out my tongue at them before running away.

My relationship with my grandmother wasn’t complicated. I won’t elaborate now on all my conjectures about her projections of self-hate, but with me she was almost always harsh and dismissive. Without a second thought, she sent me back into the night to search for the extra pair of underwear I’d dropped along the way when I returned from my first sleepover, terrified and crying. I was five. She frequently wiped her thumb across my cheeks, voicing her displeasure at the unfortunate emergence of my freckles. For years I wore them, ugly and ashamed. My skin screamed as she scrubbed too hard at bathtime. “Owwww! You’re hurting me!” I once exclaimed. “YA!” she said, “gamanhi anj-a!”* Sit still. Cut it out. And she commenced the scrubbing with increased vigor. It was clear from the time that she came to live with us that she saw me as an inconvenience to and an intruder on her time with my brother. Sometimes I was permitted to sit up with them at night while M*A*S*H or the The Jeffersons flickered soundlessly in the background. Most times, though, theirs was a private club of two that I observed from afar, my face pressed up against the screen of their indifference.

*Last Thanksgiving, as we sat around the table for the first time without my mother, we listened to my son jabbering away. Somewhere along the way, he’d adopted the name “Aunt Da-da” for my sister, Rebecca. None of us know why that’s the name he’s settled on, but we reflected on the fact that it had an uncanny resemblance to my brother’s childhood name for me. When we were young, my brother called me “ya-ya” for the first five or six years of his life. Again, we never really understood why. But as we sat there, my sister remarked: “You know what? Tim probably called you that because grandma called you ‘Ya!’ so often.” It was one of those moments when life’s little mysteries suddenly give way right before one’s eyes and become glaringly obvious. How had we never considered that before? We cracked up as we realized that for all of those years, my brother had more or less thought my name was “hey you!”

For a long time, I thought of my grandmother with bitterness and then, eventually, with little more feeling than I might have for a passing acquaintance. The last time we were all together, we were visiting my parents in Korea. My grandmother was planning to move back to LA to live with my uncle, so my mother asked the three of us to perform a small traditional bowing ceremony (Sebae) for my grandmother. It included, as does every other occasion in Korea, presenting her with money in white envelopes. Out of respect for my mother, I obliged. As we concluded and made our way out of her room, my grandmother summoned my brother back in, and when he emerged, he smugly held all of our money in his hands. He relented, of course, when he came up against our seething wall of sisterhood and redistributed the money appropriately. We weren’t really angry, though. We were simply playing our roles; by then, we’d accepted the order of things.

Last month, we all met in California at my maternal uncle’s house to celebrate my dad’s 60th birthday. In Korean culture, turning sixty is a significant milestone, and it’s usually observed with a kind of ceremonial importance. While we were there, however, my uncle wanted us to go visit my grandmother who is now in her eighties and who, he told us, probably only has a year or two left. As we drove to the assisted living center, he reminded us, again, of the story we were supposed to relay if she asked where my mother was. Because of my grandmother’s declining health and dementia, my uncle and my mother decided that they wouldn’t tell my grandmother when my mother finally did pass away. Yup. Already feeling some anxiety about this charade, I was a bit on edge when my uncle began talking about my grandmother’s deteriorated state. Because she had fallen several times recently, they agreed that she would no longer attempt to walk around and would, instead, only use a wheelchair. Switching back and forth between Korean and English, we moved from one awkward conversation to the next until, somehow, he was explaining things that we already knew about the way one loses muscle tone and control over bodily functions when wheel-chair bound. I sort of tuned out for a minute, and then I heard him say, “so…doo-doo and shee-shee, sometimes just fall out.” Just like that. And I couldn’t help it, I was four years old all over again. The laughter erupted out of me and I couldn’t stop it. The strain of the week, the hundreds of little white lies, the secrets and the absolute absurdities about our lives that my mother’s illness and death had exposed just burst out of me—rudely, unexpectedly and uncontrollably. My uncle looked at me in the rearview mirror, bewildered, and my sister looked at me, eyebrows raised, with the look I’m usually shooting her: “WTF? Get it together!” Finally, I bit my cheek and managed to get myself under control, though my body trembled for several minutes more with laughter that begged not to be contained.

We sat with my grandmother for about an hour in the courtyard, surrounded by pale pink stucco walls and other residents (all Korean) shuffling aimlessly around. Despite the warnings, I was still a little surprised to find her so vacant, to watch as our presence dawned on her more than once. It felt like a scene out a movie. It definitely didn’t feel like real life. One resident sat in the sun where she’d been wheeled. She was complaining loudly about the sun being too bright. Her eyelids drooped so deeply that we wondered how she could see anything at all, but my brother got up and moved her to a shadier spot. “Hey!” she yelled, “who was that? There’s a man around here just coming and going!” We all giggled a little under our breath and my grandmother, looking confused, joined in. My sister explained what had happened, and my grandmother began yelling at the woman, “that’s not a strange man; that’s my grandson!” “EH?!” yelled the woman, “WHAT?!” And my grandmother, probably forgetting already what had happened, yelled back, “EH?! WHAT?!” Back and forth they went, the call and response of dementia, until one or the other forgot their part and they lapsed into silence.

In the time that followed, my sister and I watched, mostly in silence, as my grandmother lovingly caressed my brother’s face and exclaimed over and over how strange it was that he was so grown up and marveled at how handsome he’d become. I was unprepared for the flood of sadness and tenderness that washed away the laughter in me and nearly made me weep. I was sad for my grandmother, for all that she’s lost to the progression of time and, in the face of so much regression, for all that she doesn’t know she’s lost. I was sad for my mother, who would never be old and for her grandchildren, who would never know her, soft, in old age. And I was sad for myself, not old at all, but suddenly, the oldest in this line of women. 

However, I was also grateful for the opportunity to go back. We don’t get the chance very often to return to those moments in life that shape us, to rewrite our narratives. There we were, children again. My brother and my grandmother were wrapped up in their intimacy, and I sat across from them in the courtyard. This time, though, I wasn’t angry or jealous or hurt. I thought of my son, who is the same age, now, as my brother was when we stood in the yard all those years ago. Time flies so quickly and we are promised so little. It’s up to us to find those small splashes of love and beauty where we can, to discover those moments that originate in us or around us and rock us gently or wildly to our core. And when we can’t, perhaps we can trace the ripples that began elsewhere back to their sources. Maybe I couldn’t love my grandmother, but I can love the woman who has loved my brother with such tenderness. And that is enough.

Another Day, Another Death

It has been a really brutal winter for those of us stuck in this seemingly endless polar vortex that led to an absurd amount of snow days, freakishly frigid temperatures and entire city shutdowns. At the beginning of the week, however, we had actual spring-like weather. I wore a skirt. And flats. Then Wednesday, bitter about its middle-of-the-week status, brought a thirty-degree temperature drop and more snow. But for those two days, I felt more alive than I have in months. Everyone else seemed to be feeling the same way. When I pulled up at one of our most popular toddler parks, it was buzzing with parents and kids hyped up on sunshine. I seriously thought (hoped?) that we might all break out in song and dance, flashmob style, to Pharrell Williams’ “Happy.” I’m sad to report that nothing of the sort materialized, but I danced a little in the parking lot until my son—only two but already embarrassed by my shenanigans—told me to cut it out.

For me, at almost 33 years old, the transition from the hard freeze of winter to the soft warmth of spring is a welcome but expected shift; I survived the winter because I knew that it would eventually end (we’re not quite beyond the wall, yet). I hadn’t considered, however, what my son thought about the perpetual state of cold.  When I stopped to think about it, I realized that last spring was half his lifetime ago. The days when we frolicked half-clothed from sunrise to sundown, when shoes were optional and new grass tickled our bare legs, when milk-drunk was still a thing—those days are nothing more than some hazy baby heyday to him. I first realized this as we got out of the car and he stopped in his tracks to stare at a group of college-aged boys across the grass. Engaged in all manner of muscular feats, they were, wait for it…shirtless. It’s no secret to those of you who know us, that my son is a never nude. He requires head-to-toe clothing nearly all of the time. So seeing a group of half-clothed guys was akin to, I dunno, a unicorn sighting or something else of equally mythic proportions. “Mommy!” he exclaimed as he stood there squinting in his sunglasses, “those big boys are naked! I see his’s [sic] belly buttons!” I explained, of course, that they weren’t naked, merely shirtless.  “Huh…” he responded, part-assenting, part-incredulous and part-awakening to this new “nudist” movement before him. As we walked over to the playground he kept glancing backwards, as if to make sure that those guys were still there in all their lean, vaguely threatening, bare belly-buttoned glory.

During these past few months since my mom’s death, I’ve felt similarly shocked and scandalized by all of the things that her passing has laid bare—particularly, my mortality. I can’t take my eyes off of it. I feel like I’m perpetually looking over my shoulder for all the ways that I might die. Quietly growing cancer. Sudden cerebral hemorrhage. Car crash. Plane crash. Train wreck. Heart attack. Victim of random violence. Shark attack. I guess those last two are somewhat redundant, but you get the picture. I’ve always been a worrier, but I’ve never really had this kind of palpable anxiety about my death. Clearly, death has always been on the horizon for me. (Unless, of course, vampires really do “come out of the coffin”; I’ll gladly sign up for that blood drive in exchange for immortality. Zombie apocalypses can suck it, though. No thank you to rotting flesh and brains on the menu for eternity.) However, I never felt that it was imminent in the way that I do now. I understand how people end up as shut-ins, too terrified to open the door to incalculable variables, to unforeseen dangers and to those encounters that sideswipe us, leaving us wounded on the side of the road. Luckily for me, I have this beautiful kid who needs to be walked and watered daily (and sometimes I feed him, too!). So I’m forced to go about the practice of living while I continue to fret about dying. It’s a practice that I’ve found surprisingly invigorating. Seriously, try it. Get some major death anxiety and then go about your daily life. It’s better than BASE jumping.

When we finally made it from the parking lot to the playground, he ran straight to the swings and asked to be lifted up. I rolled my eyes on the inside and said, “wouldn’t you rather go down the slides?” Last year, he hated swinging. He’d sit in the swing for about 45 seconds before asking to get down. And then up again. And then down. It was maddening. He’s always been opinionated and independent, but I wouldn’t call him a risk taker, and there was something too risky about the swing for him. I could tell that he desperately wanted to enjoy it, but he just couldn’t give himself over to it. I’ll admit that some days, lazy, exhausted and/or ambivalent, I wanted him to love swinging so that I could just stand in that hypnotic sway for a few minutes with the other moms. Nope. He wanted to scrape his knees toddling and toppling around on the pavement. He wanted to eat woodchips and sand. So I expected much of the same when he asked to be lifted up into the swing this time. His little fingers gripped the swing as I gave him a few gentle pushes and then, tentatively, he tipped his back slightly, looked up at the sky and exclaimed: “Look, mommy! I see an airplane!” He let out an exhilarated shriek of joy as he told me, “I go fast! I flying!”

That’s what life feels like these days. I’m going fast. I’m flying. I feel the riskiness of life each time I get into the car to drive away from my son’s daycare. I feel it as I sit down at my laptop to write. I feel it each time I open myself up to new people and new places or old people and old places when I’d rather be sitting at home alone. I feel the way that each of those choices suspends me above huge chasms of uncertainty, the way they promise failure and destruction. Fear is healthy. It alerts us to danger and keeps us out of harm’s way. But there’s something compelling about fear, as well. It can lead us to the most breathtaking heights and profound discoveries. It strips away the detritus of complacency, of habitual living, of losing oneself in the drone of the day-to-day. We are more alive than ever when we’re lit up with fear, racing toward or away from something. Adrenaline junkies everywhere can attest to this. Every day is life or death. Our lives hang perpetually in the balance. #YOLO. You know what I mean; you’ve heard all the idioms and clichés before.

That day, we stayed at the swings for a long-ish stretch of time (in toddler minutes, anyway) feeling life anew as the wind rushed through our hair, and we considered the possibility of disaster, weighing all those what ifs: What if the swing doesn’t hold? What if I fly away? What if this life gives way before I’m ready? What if it’s all as painful and disappointing as it sometimes promises to be? Okay, so my son was still just concerned about those shirtless boys and the wispy white trails of airplanes as they zigzagged across the sky. But I was thinking, “well, what if?” Here’s what I know. I’m a little (A LOT) more gray-headed than I was at this time last year. But that just means I’m a little wiser, too, right? My pockets are heavier, lined with those hefty stones of loss and grief that threaten to drown me some days. In other ways, though, I’m lighter than ever; each day I find myself shedding the things that don’t really matter in favor of those things that do matter. And, yes, I’m afraid of so much these days. But I can’t shake this feeling that it’s not the kind of fear that I should run from. Instead, I feel a little more certain every day that it’s the kind of fear that I should lean into. It’s the kind that makes me want to tentatively tip my head back. Because sometimes, if we’re willing to relinquish the safety of the ground and give ourselves over to soaring, fear leads us to the things we most desire, to that exhilaration and joy that we might not have found otherwise.