During the final weeks of 2020, my grandpa passed away. My grandma followed four days after. Both deaths caused by Covid.
Grieving the loss of my grandparents during a global pandemic.
With normal life suspended, the events leading to their passing are shattered into fragments, assembled into an undesired memory or distant nightmare. A month later, I choose not to run, as the more familiar, comfortable response to trauma has been. Instead, I choose to sit.
I choose to ask myself, “How are you doing? Truly doing?”
My grandpa was five years shy of seeing the next century. I attempt to grasp the vast difference of what his early years of life in the 1920s looked like compared to the world he left behind on December 19, 2020. To know behind his constant, steady and loving eyes held — 95 years of all that life had to offer. Yet I’m only reminded of kindness and warmth.
My grandpa was always healthier and sharper than his actual age — he could easily fool anyone. When he experienced a seizure that paralyzed the right side of his body in 2016, I didn’t doubt his ability to recover. He didn’t hesitate to prove it. Now when I reflect back on those years, I sit in awe that I witnessed him being able to stand and champion a few steps. This is the kind of person he was. There is no doubt in my mind his muse, his strength to recover at 91 was because of his family, whom he loved dearly.
My grandma was 10 years younger. She once told me the legendary story of how they met.
It was during the Korean War. Her older brother and the man who would become her husband, my grandpa, were in the same artillery battery and became close friends. Her brother wanted the two to meet after they returned home from the war, and so their lives admirably crossed paths.
My grandparents proved the perfect complement to each other’s differences. She was extremely outgoing, friendly and lively. He was the one to keep her rooted, a place to return home. She passed away on December 23, 2020 — just four days after him. Because of the complicated situation, we hadn’t told her he passed, but I think there’s an inexplainable connection between their souls. She passed away from a heart attack.
We were in the first phases of a national lockdown. Drowned in uncertainty, anxiety and questions. I wanted to tell them in person my yearlong effort reached a destination of relief; I had been accepted to the master’s program I only thought of as an unobtainable chase just a few months ago. Instead, I packaged all my emotions into the first and last letter I wrote them. Because they lived in one of the top Korean-American assisted living facilities in Los Angeles, I convinced myself they were guarded from the world, protected by the insidious virus. By the time the facility coordinated visiting hours, it was November. What once stood like a lighthouse transfigured into one compressed memory of its poorly tinted window. That annoying window is the stamped memory of my last visit. My grandpa, on cue, asked how graduate school was going. I didn’t realize at the time the last words I spoke to him would be of assurance: I was doing well. I only wanted him to feel proud. My grandma handed the nurse a box of chocolates and made sure we took it. I never left empty handed.
It is strange how you find yourself holding it all together when you lose someone in a global pandemic. When visits are brief, masked, separated by a window and communicated through a microphone that resembles the ones in a fast food drive-thru. When the nurse breaks the news that your grandparents, who would be terribly affected by the virus, both tested positive for COVID-19. When normal hospital visits are exchanged for waiting on the phone while being transferred from one hospital floor to the next, trying to figure out which room your grandpa is in. When your parents are not fluent in English, so you take on the responsibility for daily check-ins with doctors and nurses for the latest updates. When your mom rushes into your room at 5 a.m. and without the necessity of words but from the terror in her eyes, you instinctively know what comes next.
Grandma, I‘ve felt hopeless before, but the 20 minutes of hopelessness that engulfed me from the moment the doctor said you were having a heart attack to the last call to announce your death was a type of hopelessness I’d never confronted before. It’s a conversation with no language while the world stood still and my existence all but dissipated into thin air. Even the treasured photos on my wall that comfortingly capture snippets of my favorite memories floored me.
I witnessed my mother shrivel into a fetal position; I let her stay with me until morning. It is a strange concept to grasp when all my life I was the one to completely melt into her and here I was letting her melt into me.
When friends asked if I was close to my grandparents, my mind would grasp nothing because the exact words to fully explain my relationship with them didn’t seem to exist. How does one even begin to formulate the words to describe the indefinable? The simplest explanation composes itself like this: I am the copy-paste of my grandma, and my grandpa is everything I hope to become. I will never meet another soul like theirs … it is the greatest privilege to call them my grandparents.
To say I haven’t learned from the traumatizing weeks leading up to and following their deaths is false. I have never learned so much in my life.
I learned grief is not delivered on schedule nor neatly packaged. Grief is being a stranger in your own home, a foreigner in your former existence. It’s where the past and present bend into one and you’re thrown into a novel space encircled by words said and unsaid. I feel robbed of a future I innocently convinced myself I had a right to. A future filled with images of them seeing me graduate, meeting my potential husband and celebrating future holidays.
Death is a brutal teacher but an illuminating one. Though messy and untitled at times, the undoing that happens in such a process also allows a recognition I’m given another chance to recalibrate. What represents tragedy and the end of a chapter also becomes a moment, a breath of fresh air to begin again. Moving into the new year and the new semester, I contemplated who I wanted to be and, truthfully, I didn’t have a clue. Until now.
Everything inside me is shifted. This shift is shaking me into clarity. It’s in this unraveling I’m reminded of my purpose and provided the strength to move forward — no matter how small. I’m stepping into the person my grandparents’ footsteps paved for me.
Eternally grateful, love you always 할아버지 and 할머니.
