Acceptance

Briefly, on grief

Originally written in December 2020

My dad told me a story the last time we were at the cemetery. He doesn’t open up much, but I’ve seen him cry more than ever this year. It was the first time we had seen my grandmother’s gravestone; it took half a year from when she passed to be engraved and installed, and her burial ground was left as an unmarked mound of dirt for months. There, he remembered how I told him about how it felt like I experience all five stages of grief all at once, all the time.

He told me my grandma started showing symptoms of Alzheimer’s around 2009. It only got worse within a couple of years from there, and after my grandpa accidentally overdosed on his medications and needed to be hospitalized, they ended up separated in different convalescent care facilities. My grandpa would always say the same two things to my dad each time they would talk, in person or on the phone: first, ask how my grandma was doing, then second, affirm out loud about how he needed to get healthier already so he could go see her. In 2015, he got an infection in his scarred foot while at the hospital. It spread quickly—his leg needed amputation for him to survive. My dad said he reacted quickly in saying yes to the amputation, as if it was an obvious choice to make a 92-year-old man deal with a surgery to cut off a limb.

He said my grandpa stopped asking about my grandma the last hospital visit. There was no life left in his eyes, and you could see it in the last photo my dad took together with him. He stopped asking about the wife he loved and cared for through war, prosperity, sea change, and sickness, and dreamt of going back to Korea with to start their own church. A dream God had given them.

My dad said he started accepting his parents’ sicknesses and mortality for the first time after noticing this. He had denied my grandma’s Alzheimer’s for years, praying every single morning and every night for a miracle. He kept praying until her death in April this year, and found a void in losing part of his daily prayer. Instead of losing the ritual, he decided to keep praying, now for her peaceful passage to heaven, where she could protect us all the most and be with the husband she always loved again.

He told me beside the gravestone he finally understood what acceptance was.