Growing up, my family went to service every Sunday at our local Korean church. I remember having to learn about the stories in the Bible in a room in the church with the other children, all of whom were younger than I was. We were taught the books of the Bible and watched the Vegetales retelling of David and Goliath. But even as a child, I was never moved by any of the displays of spirituality or felt as though I was making contact with something bigger than myself. They were always just stories, like the ones I learned in Korean school about the bear who became a woman after eating only garlic in a cave for 100 days. I chalked it up to the fact that I knew as a child that faith in a god was for those who needed it and I did not. Over time, I developed this view, modified it with the atheist analysis and found answers in science. Religion stemmed from the human need to explain phenomena that were out of our control and to find solace from the harsh realities of daily life. I thought I had always already disavowed that sort of spirituality. I was at the center of my life and ultimately it is my radical choice and consciousness that has any bearing on how I navigate the world. My studies in college in philosophy provided further rational responses to faith and religion. The Sartrean notion of radical freedom and bad faith were particularly seductive, yet harsh, way of conceptualizing the human experience. However, I never registered how truly bleak the notion of finitude was. I used to contemplate death a lot for an elementary schooler and I don't think I was ever truly scared of death. Death was always a void and definitive end. Afterlife sounded to fantastical to be something to invest in as a possibility, reincarnation even more so.
When my grandmother, aunt, and uncle passed in a sudden and horrific car accident, my family flew out to Dallas to take care of their affairs. The only person to survive the tragedy was my baby cousin, who was protected by his mother's embrace upon impact. I was too young to really understand what was going on at the time. We were camped out in their still home in the spring. The house was slightly musty and only seemed to ever be lit by the streams of soft, faded light coming through the windows. I only have a vague memory of the sense of anxiety in the air, like no one could stay still for too long. Hushed conversations had in Korean that I didn't understand. The smell of rain outside and the images of my brother and I collecting the small snails, no bigger than a bead, drawn out by the moisture, in styrofoam cups. I don't think anyone explained to me in so many words what had happened. We just picked up and went. I don't remember any tears being shed, oddly enough, but everything was covered in a layer of silencing dust.
Looking back, I wonder what was running through my mother's mind. She had just lost her mother and sister. She doesn't ever mention that time much, except to say that it was true that she didn't cry. She says it's because she just had too much resentment for her mother to feel loss. Maybe that's her truth. I never really knew my grandmother and aunt. I remember them visiting us and having gone on trips to the mountains and hot springs. I remember the dolls and clothes that my grandmother sent me every so often before she passed that I treasured because I never had anything so girly. I remember the time she tried to walk me to the bus stop to go to school and I cried and threw a tantrum because I was embarrassed she couldn't speak English. I was unkind in the way only a naive child can be. It was clear that she loved me as a grandmother should, yet when she passed I could only muster forced tears because I knew that's what people did when someone dies.
When I was in middle school, a girl I knew since kindergarten passed away after being struck by a car on her way to her first day of high school. I think we were closer when we were still in elementary school. She had a younger sister and her family lived in the same courtyard we did, so we must have played together before one of us moved away. The only thing I remember for sure is that she used to sell jewelry she made on the bus when we both were in middle school. The first thing she said to me after we hadn't seen each other for a while was to give me her best sales pitch on her most recent pair of earrings. On the day she passed, she was biking to the nearby high school to catch the bus to take her to her high school of choice further away. The car hit her on the road right by my house. Her family held a memorial service that my family attended. I remember seeing the room filled with the students from our schools and feeling overwhelmed by the people going up and detailing fond memories and stories they shared. I remember rehearsing what I wanted to say in my head while others went to the podium. I eventually made my way up and everything came out wrong. The phrases I practiced in my head got convoluted and were articulated too forcefully. I wanted to say how the sheer number of people in the room was a testament to how she had touched so many people's lives. Instead I said that her death will affect all of us, like I was the oracle of bad things to come. I remember becoming more and more incoherent as I suddenly started to cry, even though I didn't feel the sadness I felt was justified because I wasn't even that close to her. My friends who had also know her as an acquaintance came after the service to comfort me and the extreme guilt I felt for making this somehow about me made me cry harder. I don't remember why I cried because I truly didn't know her well enough to feel the sort of loss one does. Maybe it was the mixture of embarrassment at fumbling for my words or the realization that our possibilities in life can be cut short by forces outside of our control. Every year, her friends hold a memorial at the spot of her accident and leave flowers and a poster wishing her well on the corner street light. Seeing the traces of what's left there after a few weeks leaves me with a sort of emptiness I feel when I see the guitar in our house that used to be my aunt's.
Maybe I don't know how to grieve. Or how to meet death. Recently, a truly talented and incredible artist passed away after grappling with his depression. I usually don't take much note of the passing of celebrities, but his passing was haunting and what I think was the first time, I cried over someone's death with sense of genuine grief. Bizarre, I know, given that I can't even muster that kind of emotion of my own loved ones. My mind keeps ruminating over how much he created and how much he suffered. And his suffering never made him cruel, but only kind. In his last words to his sister, he asked for her to tell him that he did well in his life. That despite his inability to continue with the pain, that he did well to come this far and have endured so much. In my thoughts, I caught myself hoping that he would find peace and happiness wherever he was or in his next life time. For his sake, I wished that there was some relief he could find in death. That death was not just the erasure of someone's life. That all he did in his life somehow carried some cosmic justice for him in death. But how can I reconcile that hope with the utter lack of belief in such powers that be? Maybe I'm more spiritually inclined that I realize. In times of guilt, I do imagine my grandmother looking down at me. It's not so much that I think that there is a heaven or a hell, but that the things that one does in their lifetime carries through in those still living. That their energy doesn't just dissipate, but becomes a part of the people who learn from their lives and their passing. To guide them to kindness and patience. To appreciate what you have when you have it. To live so that people can say that you did well.
