Yesterday was the 49th day since Haba passed from this earth.
On that morning, I didn’t have the words. Maybe I still don’t. All I could describe was the feeling. Grief is sedimentary. I felt it piling and weighing throughout my being, pulling down the corners of my body. The tiredness was the measure of it — a reminder that the world had shifted, even as my surroundings half a world away were unchanged.
Sadness is ragged, illogical. It breaks only when spoken aloud, or this weekend when I sat next to a gentleman dressed like him to the nines, on a plane. At 36,000 feet, I thought it might be him, visiting for a final time — yet I held back from striking a conversation, at the hazard of being wrong, being crazy — of imposing my own grief upon a stranger for a six-hour plane journey. The force of this wish broke me, by the baggage claim.
I’ve learned that in a Korean Buddhist tradition, the 49th day is significant — the last of the window before a soul passes from this life into the beyond. It gave me comfort to find some way of remembering — a stake in absence of knowing tradition and ritual, an anchor on the calendar as the following days began to accelerate and bleed. Yet yesterday, amidst our morning prayer, it would give way to a feeling of catastrophe, of absolute loss — cosmic and complete.
On Tuesday, I found myself driving the streets of Chinatown and downtown Las Vegas — picking up flowers, rice cakes, seven kinds of fruit for the ceremony, a few of his favorite foods. Gomtang soup — something he rarely actually ate, perhaps a meal that we never even shared. But perhaps that was because it was revered — he seemed to hold his highest standards for Korean food, near refusing it unless it was the best. A few pieces of hamachi sashimi, our go-to treat for aging teeth; as granddaughter dotes on grandparent, a sushi lunch became a reversal of the Froot Loops he fed to five-year-old me. And the most obvious choice — a cut of prime rib from Lawry’s. This would have been his first pick — that, or a steak dinner. It was a small satisfaction to gift a meal that for years, had been too tough to eat. Gomtang, hamachi, and the Lawry cut: a balance between these three countries he has called home.
On the 49th day, we arrived at the only Korean Buddhist temple we could find nearby. Tiredness is shared, more than tears, more than words: the unifying feeling as we drove in the car — my mother, grandmother, sister, and me. We surrounded his picture with these offerings, a ceremony capped with each of us presenting three cups of calpico purified by incense, and three bows. At some point, invisibly, the monks had sliced off shards of the fruit and adorning dishes, now floating in calpico in a silver bowl. And too soon, it was done. The foods were moved to the kitchen for a shared meal.
Ceremony complete, it was all the way back at the house when again it hit me. It was the moment I realized I had no photographs of him, surrounded by gifts and a warm light and an altar filled to the brim. The blow of secondary loss: another missed chance to remember him.
I wish I had the words: to commemorate love, to convey his being. But to honor a tremendous life, a person who is of you and part of you — I still feel like I don’t have the words.
But it’s these chances of remembering that are ungiven — imperfect, and impossible — a mark that we were loved, that we were here.
May you shake the dust, carry our love, and fly to a place of freedom and peace.
We love you.
Donald Yong Don Park, 1929–2022
