Sangju

My grandmother lived with us for the first few years we lived in the States. I was very young, and my memories from this time are all a sepia blur. Mostly it's just impressions. She was very old even then -- thinning snow-white hair a fright, thicky creased eyes weighted down by flaps of drooping flesh. She wore dull grey peasants' clothes, sashes over petticoats and a tiny sheathed dagger at her neck, that probably looked anachronistic when she was a girl.

She never learned any English. She refused to look at the TV. She never acknowledged strangers on her morning walks. Her only connection to the outside world were the Korean newspapers my aunt would send to her at the end of every month, when they were weeks out of date and brittle and red with age. For all that my used to feel that my parents lived apart from the world of mainstream American culture my friends' families all seemed to inhabit, my grandmother lived one step further removed, in a tiny bubble of reality of her own fashioning that had its own time and its own rules.

The neighborhood children were all scared of her. They called her a witch, and I think I believed them, because she was the one who taught me all of the superstitious nonsense my parents didn't want me to know.

You can read the future in the way cards fall, and in the fight of birds.

Begin things when the moon is new, and never during its wane.

Wear your clothes inside out to confuse evil spirits.

Never cut your nails at night; cast the trimmings into the fire.

And so on.

I don't believe any of this, you understand. This is the 21st century, and I'm not a superstitious man by nature. There is no place in my life for folk remedies and old wives' tales.

--

A week ago my grandmother fell and hit her head, causing an intracranial blood clot followed by hydrocephalus and, eventually, coma. I have been getting sporadic word from my parents, who have flown to Seoul to do whatever it is one does when your mother is ninety and in a coma. Things sound grim -- a ventricular catheter has been installed to drain excess cerebrospinal fluid, but although the intracranial pressure has been relieved somewhat, she hasn't responded to the treatment yet. The doctors, reading between the lines, are at a loss. Korean women of her generation do not often live to be ninety.

I will need to get ready. I am the oldest grandson and heir, and there are things that will need to be done. They will tie my hair back with hemp and call me sangju, and I will guide the spirit to heaven. I will write write a blessing on the funeral shroud, pour a sacrament of wine over the grave, and burn her last garment as an offering to the gods. My wails will comfort the spirits of our ancestors and open the gates of heaven. It will mean the difference between curse and benediction.

Things have been a little jarring, lately. I am at work, I am talking to my parents about feeding tubes and cranial shunts and catheters, I am pushing papers across my desk, but I am not here. I am not here at all.