Story by Clementine Evans
Online Managing Editor
Illustration by Isole Kim
Co-Design Editor
Seventy-five percent of my grandparents are dead. I witnessed the death of one; I paid a visit six days before the death of another; and only heard stories about the third who died before I was born. Their deaths weren’t necessarily devastating for me, which left me uncertain whether to view my lack of grief as something positive or negative. However, love has always been part of my family, but so has death, and wherever love starts to sprout, death seems to follow.
The first death was my maternal grandfather. He passed away during the height of the pandemic, and his journey was a series of chaos and challenges for him and for us. His decline began with a fall, a hospital stay, and discharge. Then another fall, a longer hospital stay, which culminated in hospice care in our one-bedroom apartment for his final 65 hours. The experience wasn’t horrifying the entire time — the rough times were mixed in with good and lighthearted ones. Since he still wasn’t eating, my mom gave him CBD oil (marijuana) to stimulate his appetite, with little success. However, the upside was that he was in a temporary state of euphoria with giggle fits. That was probably the most animated and energetic we had seen him. And there were the times during hospice when I would walk past his hospital bed in our living room and he would weakly nod to say hello to me. But the bad moments were pretty bad. The one that will be burned in my head is the stench after he died. It was surreal and outright gross for me to see his body in our house an hour after he had passed and then have the smell remain for days after he was taken away. Even though this experience was gruesome, after the calm settled in, I became enlightened. I realized that it’s a privilege to help someone as they pass on.
My experience with my paternal grandmother was different. Her decline was more drawn out, spanning several years. My grandmother was an interesting person, and she was very concerned about the way she was perceived by others. She was so obsessed with this that she was able to “fool” my father’s family and me into not realizing that she had serious memory issues. Once we all realized what was really going on, her illness rapidly progressed. She moved from her three-bedroom house to an independent living facility to an assisted living facility. Following a series of mini-strokes and a rapid advancement of her Parkinson’s disease, she was moved to Hopewell House for hospice care. My mother and I drove up to Portland to see her after hearing this news — since we had both gone through this process before, we knew she didn’t have very long. We traveled 16 hours there and 16 hours back in the span of three days. When I arrived at her hospital room she was unconscious, twitching every so often because of her Parkinson’s. I had returned home to South Pasadena by the time she passed away and my dad got the call. I had a complicated relationship with my grandmother. She held certain beliefs about me and other people of ethnic backgrounds that I found disagreeable. But she was still family, and she was yet another relationship I’d failed to foster.
My third grandparent passed before I was born, so his death isn’t something I can go into a lot of detail about, and I’m not entirely sure what happened. In short, my paternal grandfather came out as gay when he was in his 40s. He left my grandmother and her three kids. From what I’ve heard from my father, my grandfather had AIDS and died from a cold while he was with his partner in Texas. Unfortunately, I wasn’t alive to get to know him, and I regret not having had the chance to meet him due to certain similarities we both shared. For this death, I really can’t blame myself for not having a relationship with my grandfather, but it still doesn’t feel great that when I came into this world, I only had 75 percent the typical number of grandparents that others do.
With all of these people, their deaths were painful, but not in the way that I’ve seen on TV. I wasn’t completely crushed. It took a while for me to actually process their deaths individually. Their physical death isn’t the loss that I’ve been mourning; it’s more the loss of the relationship I never had with any of them. Hiraeth, a Welsh word meaning the longing or nostalgia for something that never existed, feels fitting for my circumstances.
Before my grandmother died, I never really had a relationship with her. She was this kind of distant figure whom I would see sometimes. She and I never lived in the same state at the same time. We were never able to achieve the typical grandmother-granddaughter relationship, one with me coming home to her freshly baked cookies and watching movies together. With my maternal grandfather, there were just too many barriers that didn’t allow us to connect. Mainly, it was language. He spoke almost solely Korean, and I only spoke English and about seven words of Korean. He loved me more than any of my grandparents, and I could tell even through our dividing language obstacle.
Right now, the death that I’m mourning is the death of something that I never truly had. Obviously, I had a relationship with each of those grandparents, but they were strained. It was like having a broken ankle, and every time I would see them, the ankle would heal a little more, but it would forever remain broken.
Death has been a part of my life ever since I can remember. Whether it was from going to a relative’s funeral when I was two and a half, or actually being one of my grandfather’s caretakers, it feels natural. I don’t think I’ve necessarily been desensitized to death, but more that I’ve gotten used to it. These physical deaths have begun to feel more like statistics than losses, but the absence of a relationship is the grief that strikes me hard. Yes, I lost these people (mostly) recently, but, in truth, I lost them long before their bodies passed on.
