Memories of Loved One Never Die

Around this time of year, my family always honors my grandmother, who died 12 years ago on the day before Halloween. My mother lights the incense. Then she carefully arranges fresh flowers and plates of food around a framed photo of my maternal grandmother.

The guests arrive, dozens of them, carrying crates of Asian pears, pickled vegetables and bottles of Gallo jug wine.

We pray and eat dinner, all seated on the carpeted floor, all munching nuts and dried fish cutlets. The talk is quiet, broken only by an occasional chuckle from someone sharing a memory of my grandmother.

I think she would be pleased to be remembered this way. But I know if my grandmother were there, she would scarcely have time to enjoy the attention. She would be rushing back and forth between the living room and the kitchen, bringing out more dishes piled with food. She would ignore the protests of guests who say their stomachs are about to burst. Instead, she would chide them for not eating enough.

All these things I remember clearly. And I can still recall some of her mannerisms, the way she would finger her rosary beads while sitting in her chair in the afternoon. But I am forced to admit to myself that I am forgetting many other things: The sound of her voice, the scent of her clothes, and even the taste of her traditional Korean potato dishes, are fading. And with each departing memory, I feel I’m not only losing her, but that, in some way, she is losing her life all over again.

It seems unjust that a person who was so much a part of my life should dissolve from my mind in the same absent way that I have forgotten teachers, old cars my parents owned, meals I have eaten. It seems a tragedy, and a betrayal of that big-boned, round-faced woman who meant so much to me.

She wasn’t just my grandmother--she was all I had when my parents left Korea 24 years ago to find a place to live in America. My sister and I stayed with her for two years, until my parents sent for us.

Though I was just 3, I still remember the day my grandmother took us to the airport in Seoul and cried as we boarded the plane for our new home across the ocean.

When I next saw her, I was in the third grade and she was coming to join us in America. “Did you shrink?” I asked when I met her at Los Angeles International Airport.

My grandmother just laughed and squeezed my hand.

My sister and I had been latch-key kids while my parents struggled to make a success of a cramped market in a poor neighborhood. But with my grandmother around, our lives blossomed. Our house belonged to her the minute she arrived. Most people have an easier time talking about their plans than carrying them out, but my grandmother rarely said a word about what she was going to do. She just did it.

She rolled up her sleeves and planted a garden of watermelon and potatoes, irises and marigolds. She made jars of kimchi and stored them in the garage to ripen. She sewed covers for all the dining room chairs and the piano bench.

Because the vacuum was too modern a device for her, she cleaned on her hands and knees.

On hot summer days, we sat in the backyard and ate rice dabbed with hot red pepper paste and covered in lettuce. It was my grandmother’s belief that the best way to cool off was to eat something hot. I didn’t agree with her, and I still don’t buy it, but she was adamant.

“You can’t take little bites,” she would yell at me and my sister. “You have to stuff the whole thing in your mouth at once.” She would demonstrate by opening her mouth wide and chewing the mixture with bulging cheeks.

Nothing seemed to faze her. She had lived through so much. She told us about Japan’s invasion of Korea, about seeing her neighbors thrown live into mass graves and stabbed with bayonets by Japanese soldiers when they tried to escape. She was brought near starvation during the Korean War, yet survived.

Pampered children, my sister and I would huddle around my grandmother during rainstorms. She paid no attention to the thunder crashing around us, or the rain pelting the metal sheet that covered the porch of our small house. She went on tending her plants, pulling away the dead leaves.

I became so used to seeing my grandmother as this fearless force in my life that I believed if death did take her, it would not be for decades.

Yet by the time I started high school, I noticed my grandmother would get up later and later. I naively reprimanded her. I pointed to the old woman across the street. “She’s as old as you are,” I told her in Korean. “She bikes to the supermarket. You can’t lie around in bed.”

Sick already, she groaned and turned away.

One afternoon, my sister and I waited at the library for my mother to pick us up after school. We were surprised when both our parents came. On the way to the car, even though they said nothing, we realized something bad had happened. My father’s eyes were red.

“Your grandmother is dead,” my father said bluntly. She’d died of heart failure. My father, who never cried, broke down.

Just like that she was gone. I had no chance to say goodbye or say I was sorry for the times I behaved badly.

At dinner, we set the table for four rather than five. When my sister and I came home from school each day, the silence in the house seemed overwhelming.

Yet gradually, we began to become accustomed to her absence, and to ourselves without her. I drew symbols and pictures after she died to remember her. Yet, when I look at them now, I can’t remember what most of them meant.

So around this time of year, I try hard to remember her, to picture her, to hear her. Because I am convinced that one who is remembered never dies, I try to keep her alive in my mind. But my mind is an unreliable partner. And each fall, I can’t help wondering what memories have slipped away since last year.