Grief in-between: A story of grieving in an East Asian household

Growing up in a Korean American immigrant family, I felt as though there was always a struggle between two different cultures, two different lives as my immediate family were separated from my extended family by an ocean. When my maternal grandfather, a man who spent the majority of his life in South Korea but also spent years in America to help take care of my sister and I, passed away, I again felt this strange disconnect, this time between the man I knew in America versus the man that my parents and extended family knew in Korea.

Flying back “home” to Korea, being greeted by relatives that knew me as a child but not much as an adult, and going through traditional Korean funeral traditions seemed something so detached. And yet, years later, I still remember each day we were in mourning and the emotions I had felt when we buried my grandfather’s ashes, showing how grieving the loss of a loved one is universal rather than inhibited by cultural barriers.

In South Korea, there really is no clear belief in the afterlife, but there is a heavy emphasis on filial piety. With that belief, modern funerals that are usually held in hospitals are the place for the family to come together and cry as an announcement for the passing of the ancestral loved one.

When I had first gotten to the hospital after a long 15-hour plane ride, I was immediately rushed into the funeral service full of emotions, reunions, and stories of our family history. It was within the three days of traditional mourning that I had realized I felt like I hadn’t known my grandfather much at all. My cousins who I had grown up with in my childhood could communicate memories with my grandfather, but I only had flickering moments that I could conjure.

Grieving the loss of someone who I was told had an amazing impact of my life, yet being unable to tell stories of him, to me was a worse feeling than grieving someone I had known my entire life. I felt like an outsider, someone who didn’t deserve to grieve such an impactful and generous man like my dad said he was. 

After the three days of mourning, my entire family set out to the mountain where some of my other relatives had been interred, including great grandparents and a brother that my mother had lost when she was younger. We performed an offering of food and wine for the mountain god (at least that’s what my mother told me), and then we laid dirt over my grandfather’s burial to bring closure to his death. During those moments, I felt like the whole process was so performative, a tradition that I couldn’t quite grasp as those around me knew exactly where to step, bow, and pray.

To this day I am not sure what all of it meant, even after I looked up “Korean funeral traditions” on Google. I left Korea with an itch for return to normalcy and a want for belonging mixed with the melancholy of losing someone so impactful in my life. 

After returning to America, I became overwhelmed by my lack of emotion towards the loss of my grandfather. I guilted myself, wondering how I couldn’t shed one tear for a man that I knew gave a lot of his life for me to grow up without hardship. I grieved without really grieving, wanting to know a man more after he had passed away rather than before. I didn’t feel like I could talk to my parents, and I wouldn’t even talk to my younger sister until years after his death. Talking about emotions isn’t a big thing in East Asian families, if at all.

But then one day, my sister and I were laying in bed when my grandfather came up in conversation. It was easy to say how I felt about the whole situation suddenly, as if it was something that I could laugh about years later. We both realized we had felt the same way, lost between two cultures and two families. We both talked about how we had felt grief in combination with an identity crisis, a feeling that lingered for so long it affected how we thought the world viewed us - as Korean? As American? Or neither?

In many ways my grief for my grandfather's passing marked a transitional period in my life. Yet what my sister and I ended the conversation on was more of how we missed the man who helped change our diapers and walked us to school. My guilt in not knowing him as others have turned into emotional grief, missing a man in my life more than ever before. At that moment I forgot about cultural barriers, perceptions, and traditions and just ached to know my grandfather for who he was. I missed him even though I could not tell stories about him. Not being able to vocalize your grief is in many ways the worst pain one can experience. For me, however, knowing that I could miss him was enough. 

For years I would mark him as one of the greatest people to have walked the earth, a symbol for my tumultuous emotional journey and for the acceptance of two cultural identities. Without my grandfather, an immigrant family in America would be a larger struggle than it actually is. He gave me the motivation to understand the world in “in-betweens,” rather than trying to fit with a single identity and exclude the other. My grief for his passing blossomed into acceptance, understanding that emotional and cultural journeys are what make up my unique story and family. To this day, I will never forget him. 

— Jenny Kim