Words Left Unsaid

While my grandmother’s sudden hospitalization was a surprise, her illness was not. We had seen her condition decline whenever we visited her, as if we were viewing frames plucked from the film of her retirement. Many times I’d overheard my grandfather telling my father in hushed tones of her weakening state. 할머니 put on a positive face, acting as if nothing was wrong, as if her body was not deteriorating. Once we visited unannounced to find her in bed, unable to move for the weakness of her muscles. How is school? she asked me and my brother, her eyes tightly shut. Good, we said. All is good, 할머니. You rest. We tried to cheer her with good news and funny stories from school, as if our words would give her the strength to rise out of bed and wrap us in hugs as she had done before. My brother and I stared at each other for a moment, and I saw his eyes glistening through the haze of my own tears.

In the next months, she told us she felt stronger. No need for a doctor, she said. My body is healing on its own. I told myself that her body was only slowing from age. That was all. She would be okay. She had gotten a wheelchair to help her from her bed to her kitchen table to her couch, her new domain to which she was restricted. My heart hurt, but I didn’t know how to help; each time I stretched my arms to help her move from her wheelchair, she always pretended not to see. She lifted herself on shaky arms and collapsed onto the couch. She was still young, her eyes seemed to say. Her body disagreed.

Whenever I visited her during this time, I was reminded of the past—not of when I was younger, but when my father was. 할머니 had my dad’s sixth grade photo on a magnet on her refrigerator, a photo taken in the year they moved from Korea to the US. I would look at my dad’s bowl cut and missing teeth and wonder about these bygone years. I never asked about them, though. 할머니 didn’t like much to talk about the past, so what I knew from her history I heard from my dad—how she was separated from her father and brothers during the Korean War, how she had marched three hundred miles from Pyongyang to Busan to escape the budding Communist regime, how she had had the courage then to uproot her young family once more and risk a life in America. The past is the past, 할머니 said. Still, 할머니’s photo albums became a bridge to my own history. I gazed into the faces of relatives I would never meet.

As she connected me to my family’s history, 할머니 also connected me to my Korean heritage. When I was young, she had raised me as my parents worked. My first words, as a result, were in Korean: first her name, then “piggyback,” then “again.” But my parents feared that I’d be set behind in English—the language that would determine my studies, my future, and my career—if I continued to speak in Korean. One day, they began speaking to me only in English, so my Korean words were pruned from my mind as quickly as they had grown. Too lopped off was the yet-ungrown forks of my developing identity. By forgetting Korean, I was exiled from the place of my heritage, not by a physical barrier but by the language barrier that so commonly affects the children and children of immigrants. I would be unable to return to the Korean peninsula without a translator, and I would be unable to reconnect with my people, my very own relatives. 

Spending time with 할머니 was different. Speaking with her, eating the Korean food she had spent hours preparing, connected me again to my past on a strange bridge of Korean newspapers, 바둑 (Go game), and dried persimmons. Still, I never relearned Korean. I was always quieter in Korean than I was in English, lacking the words beyond my elementary knowledge to communicate and embarrassed of my 교포 foreigner accent. With each confused nod and fumbled phrase, I made a silent vow to learn Korean, if for no reason but to call my grandmother, converse with her, and imagine her smile spreading on the other side of her phone. I never kept these vows. It’s what I regret most.

It was a day in September, when the harsh winds come down the mountains and sweep into the town in which I live, that I was told 할머니 was in the hospital. She’s okay, my dad said. They’re going to run some tests and give her medicine. His tone was calm, unshaking. We went to visit her that night. The wind rushed past us with a sense of urgency.

When we arrived at the hospital, 할머니 was asleep. I had seen her sleeping before, of course, but now it felt different. Our observing eyes suddenly made her vulnerable. My eyes wandered from her IV to her chart to her open mouth. I looked away. Dad shook her awake. I stood behind him, unsure of what to say, painfully aware of how uselessly my hands dangled by my side. I wanted to adjust her pillow, pull her blanket over her bare feet, give her a hug. But I didn’t, partly because I didn’t want to accidentally hurt her and partly because it would have felt like her remaining pride was rubbing off onto my selfish hands. 할머니, I’m here, I whispered. Ah, you came, she said. Yes. I came. Normally I would have asked her if she had eaten, but I knew she hadn’t eaten in days, and I lacked the words to say anything more complex. I slipped my hands beneath her blanket and massaged the soft, delicate flesh of her hand, the ghost of my broken promise turning my cheeks scarlet.

I visited 할머니 every day after school. It was easier when my mom was there, because her bright personality allowed me to remain silent while I soaked in the sound of my grandmother’s laughter. I held her hand and rubbed her shoulders instead. Halfway through her second week in the hospital, she told her nurses she wanted more morphine to take away the pain of her bedsores. After that, she was always sleeping wherever I went to visit. Dad tried to wake her up, but she only grunted a short recognition and went back to sleep. Don’t try again, I always said. She should rest. I was embarrassed that I wouldn’t know what to say even if she weren’t awake, that I didn’t know how to help her, that I knew I would just stay silent again. Adults always told me how mature I was, and I turned so they wouldn’t see my shame. I clasped my hands together at my sternum, bowed my head, and prayed for my grandmother. It was the only way I knew how to help her. I stood in the dark, silent, praying. Her room’s lights were always off.

My final visit was on a Friday. 할머니 was sleeping again. I asked my dad when she would wake up, when they would take her off the morphine. When she’s rested, he said, when her body can fight. It was just us two, so we were silent the rest of the time. Sometimes 할머니 would cry out like she was dreaming. I prayed for her pain to leave her body, for her soul to be freed. I prayed that she would be happy again, without wounded memories to relive in her sleep. That night before we left, I bowed to 할머니. I don’t know why I did it. I had never bowed to her before when I was leaving. It just felt right that night.

할머니 passed away Sunday morning. The next time I bowed to my grandmother was when I greeted her in her casket.

I was inconsolable through 할머니’s service. There were times when my eyes would dry, but inevitably I would remember another memory of her, and I would sob again. I delivered most of a short eulogy stoically, until I read that 할머니 would never be there to hug me when I graduated or when I left for college. Then I cried again, and I cried even more for my selfish tears. My grandmother was reunited with her father, healed from her pain, and I could only think about myself. I wept the most when, at the end of the service, I was told to stand in a line by 할머니’s casket so those in attendance could pay their final respects to 할머니 and to her direct family. Most bowed to us. Some shook my hand. Some old ladies, seeing my face mask darken with my tears, embraced me, and I sobbed into their shoulders. The line for 할머니’s final respects stretched out the door of the chapel. It broke my heart.

By the time it came to bury my grandmother, it seemed that all the tears in my body had left me, that my inner well of grief had run dry. I did not cry when I slid my eulogy beneath my grandmother’s crossed hands, when I lifted her casket from her hearse, or when I dropped a rose into her grave.

The day of 할머니’s funeral was beautiful. The sky was blue and cloudless, and a gentle breeze rustled the branches of trees. Off in the distance a mourning dove called. My grandmother’s gravesite was on a little hill where you could see the city of Los Angeles. You could see, far below, cars trudging along the freeway appearing like ants on the vast roads. You could see, if you really concentrated and followed the path of a pointing finger, the beach where my father grew up. Even further, almost obscured by a misty haze, you could see the big shipping cranes at the San Pedro bay, the ones I had called dinosaurs once when I was little. 할머니 had laughed and laughed…

The pastor cleared his throat and began to sing. Small pamphlets with the hymn’s notes and words were passed around. The song was something ceremonial, low and hopeful. I stayed quiet and listened. The pastor’s voice was steady yet expressive, strong but graceful like a gale of wind. It rose and fell with grand sweeps like the voices of the old 판소리 singers 할머니 used to listen to. After the first verse, the pastor started the second. Now the crowd was familiar with the song, so they joined in. I heard my father’s voice, my mother’s. I heard the voice of my grandfather, who I had never heard sing before. I heard the voices of 할머니’s relatives, her neighbors, her friends with whom she had immigrated to America, with whom she had struggled and shared her dreams. 

I opened the little hymnbook and began to sing, reading these Korean words without a sliver of an idea of their meaning. Our voices merged into one, led by the pastor’s steady hum, and on that beautiful day we raised my grandmother’s soul to a higher place.