Requiem
All right. First things first.
My grandmother died several months ago following a long coma. It was, frankly, a little miraculous that she hung on as long as she did. The sort of injury she sustained to her head should have killed her within hours; the doctors didn't know what to do with this old woman who refused to die.
They didn't know my family. I come from a long line of mean bitches, and my grandmother was the meanest bitch of them all.
It freaks me out a little to see those words written down. I should know better than to speak ill of the dead, and if anyone was going to reach across the veil to punish me for my impiety it would be her. But it's a true thing, nevertheless, and it's something you need to know if you're going to get the whole story.
My grandmother has always been a survivor. She remembers fleeing from the Japanese, who were marching through the peninsula slaughtering the traditional aristocracy. She told me once how she fled with her parents in the middle of the night, weighed down by all the money and jewels her tiny body could support.
My father remembers fleeing a second invasion along the same route to the south, clinging to his mother's skirts as the communists advanced towards Seoul. They spent nights hiding in ditches with other refugees. They ate fried cakes made from barley, which were stretched by adding indigestible rice grain casings that some farmer or another had discarded. (Heuk deuk, she called them -- "dirt cakes".)
She lost everything twice. After the war, after my grandfather had returned to Seoul and died in a menial job as a porter, my grandmother made a meager income for her family by selling the last of her jewels and becoming a small-time loan shark, handing out small parcels of cash to people more desperate than her and enforcing her contracts with what few spells and curses she knew. It was a meager deterrent; even in those days, few people believed in curses. But my grandmother took what money there was and scraped together a living, and an apartment in the city, and an education for her son.
The thing she would never forget -- the thing she would never let you forget -- was how her family had been robbed of its rightful place in the world. Hers was the noblest of clans; imperial blood flowed through her veins. At her poorest, she still demanded to be spoken to like a yangban.
Which is why she despised anyone she thought was below her position. Like her neighbors living in her ghetto. Like the nouveau middle-class family my mother came from. Like me.
My father doted on her, a good, pious son. Like so many of his generation, he was sent to America to earn a living and to send money back to support the family. But it was never enough for her. How dare he spend money on his whore wife and his two misborn children instead of sending money home? He tried bringing her to America to live, and she was miserable. He set her up with a nice condo in an upscale suburb of Seoul, and she was miserable. Everything about my grandmother's life was dramatic, and conflict swirled around her, like a solar system orbiting a star.
This is why we were so anxious when she slipped and hit her head. Somehow her body had become old and frail without any of us realizing it. None of us had ever really considered the possibility that she might die, and nobody knew what was going to happen once she was gone.
My sister and I anticipated the worst. My father and his sisters had spent so long living in the shadow of guilt that there would be some sort of a feud, and they would blame one another for her death, and they would blame one anothers' spouses, then their children, and the family that my grandmother held together by sheer force of will would tear apart.
Thank god, then, for long comas. Nine months is a long time to come to terms with someone's death. After a brief period of inevitable squabbling, my father and his sisters met and put the family's affairs in order.
By the time my grandmother died (gathering just enough consciousness to swear at the nurse with her last breath), it was agreed that there would be a modern funeral. The period of mourning was reduced to three days of sleeplessness and fasting. Her body was cremated and interred in a temple instead of being buried in the family plot with all of ceremony and wailing and beating of chests that that would have entailed. It was a quiet, unglamorous ending to a long, dramatic life, and perhaps the only modern thing my grandmother has ever done.
My grandmother died several months ago following a long coma. It was, frankly, a little miraculous that she hung on as long as she did. The sort of injury she sustained to her head should have killed her within hours; the doctors didn't know what to do with this old woman who refused to die.
They didn't know my family. I come from a long line of mean bitches, and my grandmother was the meanest bitch of them all.
It freaks me out a little to see those words written down. I should know better than to speak ill of the dead, and if anyone was going to reach across the veil to punish me for my impiety it would be her. But it's a true thing, nevertheless, and it's something you need to know if you're going to get the whole story.
My grandmother has always been a survivor. She remembers fleeing from the Japanese, who were marching through the peninsula slaughtering the traditional aristocracy. She told me once how she fled with her parents in the middle of the night, weighed down by all the money and jewels her tiny body could support.
My father remembers fleeing a second invasion along the same route to the south, clinging to his mother's skirts as the communists advanced towards Seoul. They spent nights hiding in ditches with other refugees. They ate fried cakes made from barley, which were stretched by adding indigestible rice grain casings that some farmer or another had discarded. (Heuk deuk, she called them -- "dirt cakes".)
She lost everything twice. After the war, after my grandfather had returned to Seoul and died in a menial job as a porter, my grandmother made a meager income for her family by selling the last of her jewels and becoming a small-time loan shark, handing out small parcels of cash to people more desperate than her and enforcing her contracts with what few spells and curses she knew. It was a meager deterrent; even in those days, few people believed in curses. But my grandmother took what money there was and scraped together a living, and an apartment in the city, and an education for her son.
The thing she would never forget -- the thing she would never let you forget -- was how her family had been robbed of its rightful place in the world. Hers was the noblest of clans; imperial blood flowed through her veins. At her poorest, she still demanded to be spoken to like a yangban.
Which is why she despised anyone she thought was below her position. Like her neighbors living in her ghetto. Like the nouveau middle-class family my mother came from. Like me.
My father doted on her, a good, pious son. Like so many of his generation, he was sent to America to earn a living and to send money back to support the family. But it was never enough for her. How dare he spend money on his whore wife and his two misborn children instead of sending money home? He tried bringing her to America to live, and she was miserable. He set her up with a nice condo in an upscale suburb of Seoul, and she was miserable. Everything about my grandmother's life was dramatic, and conflict swirled around her, like a solar system orbiting a star.
This is why we were so anxious when she slipped and hit her head. Somehow her body had become old and frail without any of us realizing it. None of us had ever really considered the possibility that she might die, and nobody knew what was going to happen once she was gone.
My sister and I anticipated the worst. My father and his sisters had spent so long living in the shadow of guilt that there would be some sort of a feud, and they would blame one another for her death, and they would blame one anothers' spouses, then their children, and the family that my grandmother held together by sheer force of will would tear apart.
Thank god, then, for long comas. Nine months is a long time to come to terms with someone's death. After a brief period of inevitable squabbling, my father and his sisters met and put the family's affairs in order.
By the time my grandmother died (gathering just enough consciousness to swear at the nurse with her last breath), it was agreed that there would be a modern funeral. The period of mourning was reduced to three days of sleeplessness and fasting. Her body was cremated and interred in a temple instead of being buried in the family plot with all of ceremony and wailing and beating of chests that that would have entailed. It was a quiet, unglamorous ending to a long, dramatic life, and perhaps the only modern thing my grandmother has ever done.
posted by Peter at 4:33 PM
1 Comments:
I'm sorry for your loss. I've grown up with my grandmother since I was a baby, so I'm extra sensitive to grandmother/grandfather anecdotes.
My grandmother, too, was of upper middle class before my grandfather passed away. My mom brought her over to California shortly after to live with us. She has always shown ill-will towards my father, though, for "taking" my mom away from her. (It's also because he's from a farming family). She still doesn't talk to him.
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