The Epilogue

Recently, my 이모 할머니, my great aunt on my dad's side, passed away. For the two and a half years that I did not speak to my father, I thought about her often. Mostly because I did not know if she was still alive. Not talking to my dad meant I was cut off from information that felt strangely important. When I finally reconnected with him, one of the first things I asked was whether she was still with us. Somehow, she was. I ended up visiting her at the nursing home shortly after.

Being there stirred up a lot of memories. My grandmother lived in a nursing home for a long time before she passed. The sound is always the same. A constant ringing. Help on 303. Help on 304. Help on 442. There is always someone pressing the button. The cord is long and loops around the bed rail so it is always within reach. They press it over and over again. Not to annoy anyone, but because of loneliness. That is what it feels like to me. Loneliness amplified into sound.

After a few months of visiting my great aunt, she passed away. My father later received a photograph from her belongings. My aunt, my dad's cousin, used AI to upscale it. In the photo are my great grandfather, my grandmother, my grandmother's younger brother, and I believe my grandmother's sister. My great aunt is not in the picture. Seeing it made me feel strange in a way I could not immediately explain.

I have always been interested in the idea of overlap in relationships. How long you have known someone, not just in years, but as a percentage of your life. If you meet someone at twenty and you are thirty now, you have known them for a third of your life. That number feels meaningful. When I saw that photo, I realized I had only ever known my grandmother as my grandmother. From the moment I was born, that was her role. But to her, I was only the epilogue. A small portion at the very end of a very long life. In that photo, she is about fifteen years old. Probably full of aspirations and impatience and plans, the same way I was at fifteen. I am a fraction of her life. She lived nearly ninety years.

She, too, must have had people she knew for her entire life. People whose presence felt constant and permanent. And she herself was someone else's epilogue. That cycle is unsettling and fascinating to me. It makes me think about how little we ever really know someone, even the people closest to us.

I write a lot about loneliness and death. I once wrote that death is not really death, but a loss of access to someone. Not in a religious way. Just the idea that they exist somewhere you cannot reach. Seeing that photograph complicated that idea further. Who says that when someone passes away, the version that continues on is their oldest one. Who says my grandmother remains a grandmother forever. If I were to ever run into her again, why would she be the person I knew for such a short time. She might be a twenty year old woman who wanted to see Italy or Alaska or places she never got to visit. She might be someone I would not recognize at all.

That is where a lot of my sadness comes from when I think about nursing homes. Every person there was once young. They had ambition and hunger and impatience. They had failures and victories and stories no one asks about anymore. And somehow, they all ended up there. My grandmother in a nursing home next to a Motel 8 between Woodland Hills and Northridge. My great aunt in Koreatown next to a McDonald's. After everything they lived through, they arrived at places that feel like waiting rooms.

That is why people who work in nursing homes always say the same thing. Never put me in one. My mom knows exactly what they are like. She always says that if she ever loses her mind or her ability to walk, I should abandon her in the Alps or Appalachia. She says it is better to die suddenly than to spend the last years of your life in nothingness. That thought never really hit me until I started visiting my great aunt.

Every time I visited her, I brought juice. Juice feels comforting, and the food there was never very good. She would drink it slowly and then look at me and say, 여기에 있는것은 사는게 아니야. 난 이제 사람도 아니야. Living here is not living. I am not even a person anymore.

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