Mom's Mother
On Tuesday, November 5, 2024, my maternal grandmother passed away.
“Mom’s mother” — that’s how I phrased it when I shared the news. She was my grandmother, but those words, "mom’s mother," seemed to capture my mom’s grief more clearly.
It started on Monday morning, with a call at 2 a.m. The voice of my mom's youngest brother trembled as he told her that their mother had gone into septic shock and was now in the ICU. When I woke up, my mom rushed into my room, saying we needed to fly out to Korea. We scrambled to find the earliest flight, canceled appointments, emptied the fridge, and arranged transportation.
By the time we were seated on our Air Premia flight, bags stowed and preparing for takeoff, my mom received another call from her brother.
It had happened.
We were separated by the aisle. I offered to sit next to her, reaching out to hold her hand, but she silently turned away. The entire flight, she fought back tears.
I quickly realized that the comfort she needed wasn’t meant to come from me.
Upon landing, we went directly to my grandmother’s home. The apartment — a modest 25-pyeong space — was cluttered. Old plastic containers, newspapers, and food waste filled the small pink trash bins. Some of it was from just the week before, while other items had accumulated over the years.
My mom had always criticized her mother’s living conditions, often choosing to stay in hotels when she visited. But recently, over the past year, she had decided to stay with her mom — as if she sensed something like this was coming. And during those visits, the same complaints echoed. “You need to throw everything away. Dah buh-lyuh. This place smells. Why are you raising a dog when you don’t even have money? I can’t stay here – it’s disgusting. Duh-luh-wuh.”
Why did these words, which seemed rooted in concern, feel so sharp when I heard them? Why did they sound more like jabs, laden with insensitivity? Was this how I spoke to my own mother?
The traditional mourning period, called jang-nye-shik, began immediately. We gathered in black hanboks for the women and suits for the men. The funeral home provided a standard cycle of meals — banchan, rice, and soup. It was decent at first, but by the second day, the repetition became overwhelming. The plum juice, coffee, beer, and soju helped to numb the heaviness in the air.
As guests arrived, family members and friends gathered in the "greeting room" to offer their bows. They left monetary gifts, ate, and drank in the dining area.
My grandmother’s life had been shaped by the scars of war, poverty, a disability, and an absent, unfaithful husband. As people shared stories in the dining hall, we learned new and sometimes shocking things about the woman I had known simply as “halmoni.”
On the morning of the third day, we were all drained, but there was more to be done. We were led downstairs to the morgue, where two morticians carried my grandmother’s body, wrapped tightly in a bloated shroud. Her face, pale and bruised with blue patches, was exposed. We were ushered into the room, where a pastor guided us in saying our final words to her lifeless form. Neither my mom nor I could find the words.
Later, her body was placed in the cremation chamber. We watched through a window as the flames consumed her, then, through another window, we saw her ashes transferred into a ceramic jar.
The entire process felt mechanical, as though each step was designed to elicit an emotional reaction from us. I understood the tradition, the necessity to honor the deceased, but the emotional weight felt drowned out by the logistics of it all — the wrenches of ceremony that forced us to feel, even when we didn’t know how.
In Korea, there’s a term called jung, which refers to a mix of attachment, longing, and love. It’s not easily translated into English, but I think of it as a kind of magnetism that pulls two people together over time, solidifying their bond in ways that cannot be undone.
At one point, my mom said to me, almost flippantly, “I don’t have any jung when it comes to my mom. So I’m not that sad.”
She said it aloud in front of guests, and I could see their disapproval — the subtle judgment in their glances. “How could she be so ungrateful?” “Why does she have this attitude as the oldest daughter?”
To be honest, I had those thoughts, too.
I tried to connect with her, to understand what she was feeling, but her responses were vague: silent smiles or blank nods. It was as though she was locked in her own emotional world, and I couldn’t reach her.
It wasn’t until this trip that I realized something: My mom never truly grasped most of the English I spoke to her since childhood. For years, I had been frustrated by her lack of comprehension, her empty nods, and I’d assumed that, through all my monologues, she must have understood my heart. But all I was really doing was speaking at her, reaching for responses that never came. She had buried our emotions beneath the logistics of life — school, car rides, the ordinary flow of time. And before I knew it, the “corpse” of our relationship was ready for its own cremation.
It wasn’t until my grandmother's death that I realized I hadn’t fully understood my mom either. I longed for a genuine jung with her, but I was afraid that it was impossible, as it had always been.
What I came to accept, though, was that I didn’t need to provide comfort or answers. All I could do was simply be there, in the present, with my mom. That was enough.
There are many things I’ll never fully understand about my mom or her mother. But in those moments, amidst the chaos of funeral rites and emotional exhaustion, simply being present — without expectation or judgment — felt like enough for both of us. Slowly, the burdens we carried together began to lift.