First came across Cathy Rentzenbrink from a website that had lots of info about coma/permanent vegetative state etc. Unfortunately found lots of things to be relatable. I wondered if things would have been slightly less painful if 창윤이 was hit by some stranger’s car like Cathy’s brother had been — it still would have been really painful but maybe less so.
“We’ll take anything, at this point,” Dad said, his atheism temporarily on hold.
Desperate people find faith, so now I pray to Jesus too. (Soon You’ll Get Better by Taylor Swift) I would say that I’m still an agnostic leaning atheist, but at times like these I really wish I were religious so that I could really lean on some higher being for answers. The other day I thought about how, when I was five, I prayed to Jesus everyday by the window sill for a 동생 to play with, and now, at twenty-three, I don’t know if I should pray, to whom I’d be praying, and what I should pray for.
It felt very important that I should be a good daughter.
This whole thing made me think about how I have to be as healthy as possible and how I have to live longer than my parents. A lot of people take it for granted that they’ll outlive their parents but we really can’t take anything for granted at all.
I felt like I came from a different planet from all these innocent, undamaged people. I tried a variety of answers to the question about whether I had any brothers and sisters.
Option 1: I have a brother.
Option 2: No.
Option 3: I have a brother. He’s in a permanent vegetative state after being knocked down by a car. (This option is too much, too depressing. Doesn’t even stop the conversation as people will want to ask questions about PVS. They will also want to know the prognosis. You will give answers that range from optimistically deluded to numbly unsure to misanthropically resigned. No one will know how to cope with you.
Option 4: I have a brother but he’s poorly after an accident.
Last week or so, my personal trainer asked if he was an only child. I knew that the time would come when someone who is somewhat of a stranger would ask about my family situation, and I’d been dreading it. I was somewhat surprised that I was able to handle this situation without being really affected emotionally — I said no, I have a younger brother who is in high school. He continued to ask me questions about my brother — does he want to go to Stanford like I did? What does he want to study? And I answered his questions as if the accident did not happen. I’m not sure how I’m going to handle this question going forward.
I’d grown to hate this time of year (Jan/Feb), which was cold, and then had first Christmas, then my birthday and then Matty’s to get through. I hated the way that the accident had made times that should have been joyous even worse than normal days.
Up to this point, the day that I cried the most was the day that would have been my graduation. As my parents and I drove to the hospital to visit him and drop off some supplies, I couldn’t stop thinking about how we should have all been at Stanford, at my graduation, not at a hospital in Seoul. Then I started thinking about how sad I was to miss graduation for myself, but also how I’d thought about how proud I’d be to attend 창윤이's graduations, and how he probably wouldn’t be able to attend my law school graduation. And my family’s future birthdays. Dad’s birthday was about a month after the accident and it was so tough — I haven’t missed a single birthday card ever since I could write, but I couldn’t write one this year because I knew that whatever I wrote would just be too sad and my parents and I would all be in a sea of tears. I got him dark chocolate from the Whole Foods by Stanford, a t-shirt and a set of golf balls from the Stanford bookstore. I’m already nervous about what my brother’s birthday will be like in October when I’m at school and my parents are still in Seoul, even though it’s three months away. I looked up grief resources at Stanford and coincidentally, there’s a student grief gathering session taking place exactly on 창윤이’s birthday. My dad mentioned that one of his friends’ kid was getting married but he skipped the wedding and I also cried about how 창윤이 probably won’t be at my wedding. Having been single pretty much my whole life, I sometimes thought about how nice it would be if my boyfriend/husband got along well with 창윤이. I then cried about how this list of future celebrations like birthdays, graduation, wedding, etc. is not an exhaustive list — it feels like I will never be able to have a happy moment again that is purely, 100% happy. Even the happiest moment I can have going forward will be tainted by my grief for 창윤이. I’m writing this at home while mom is at the hospital because he got transferred to the ICU last night — everyone phone call my parents get from the hospital makes me so anxious that the bad news would be worse than a transfer to the ICU.
For some years now I’d thought I wouldn’t have children. I’d survived losing Matty by the skin of my teeth and was still mired in grief and guilt, so the risk of creating a new life to love seemed too great. How could I survive the loss of anyone else?
It’s funny(?) that I also had/have the same thought. Apparently the author eventually changed her mind when she met an author at a book launch who talked about recognizing her daughter in her granddaughter’s face. Who knows what I’ll decide to do some ten years later, but it’s really scary to think about potentially losing another loved one. Raising a healthy and happy child who grows to become a healthy and happy adult is probably the most difficult task in the whole world. But then again this sentiment also reminded me of a scene from Call Me By Your Name where Timothee Chalamet’s dad talks about what a shame it would be to not feel anything as to not feel pain.
I explained how I felt like I was always about to be ambushed by memories.
Little boys, teenage boys, and even 아저씨s remind me of 창윤이 — who he was, who he was just before the accident, and who he might have become as he grew older. Every restaurant we go to reminds me of 창윤이 — the old ones because we went there together, the new ones because he would have liked it. I imagine this is how I’ll feel as I travel to new places and revisit old favorite places, too. I imagine this is how I’m going to feel for the rest of my life. It’s crazy to think that I’m only twenty-three now and when I reach my forties, I would have spent more of my life post-accident than pre-accident. And what about after my forties, when this might feel like a distant event? I’m already a pretty forgetful person — I’m really scared that I will forget our precious memories, forget his voice and laughter, and forget what it was like to just be a normal 남매. I watched a Youtube video where 법정스님 answers someone’s question about how to cope after such a big loss, and he says that we must forget and let go. I don’t want to, but even now I found that my days are more bearable when I don’t let myself think too much about all of this. But I don’t want to ‘forget and let go.’
Grief is not linear. If you could plot it on a graph, you wouldn’t see a continuous upward gradient from tragedy to recovery but a sharp set of zigzags […] Sometimes an absence can become as significant in our lives as a presence.
The weight of emptiness and absence is probably directly proportional to the meaningfulness of a presence. In other words, love and grief are directly proportional to each other. The greater the love, the greater the grief.
I don’t think I will ever not be sad about this. But there is so much to be thankful for […] I now think of myself as carrying a rucksack of grief. In some ways it is my ballast. I’m used to it. Occasionally it is so heavy that I’m not sure I can continue carrying it, but most of the time it’s bearable and some days I hardly notice it at all […] I’ve learned that almost everyone has a rucksack. The world is full of people carrying around a toxic narrative, pulled down by a sadness or grief that they don’t know how to share, and all of us are hiding it from each other. I used to bury myself in books about grief, but now I talk to real people about it too. One of the problems of being overdependent on books is that I crave the degree of narrative resolution that you find in novels. Talking more to real people has helped me to see life as the glorious, unshaped mess that it is. Things won’t fit, won’t behave, won’t allow themselves to be finished, finite, completed.
I’m not ready to talk to people about this yet, so I read. But I do eventually want to talk to a therapist and maybe some friends about this, too. The other day I cried in the shower because of how isolating grief can be. I think it’s inevitable that it feels that way right now, when everything is still a fresh wound. But eventually I do not want to let this grief cage me in isolation.
