excerpts of the 100th day
One day, Halmuni walked into a temple. She chose Buddhism from that day on. The people at church say they’re good Christians, but not really. Their actions said otherwise. This is a running streak in our family, a bristle at inauthenticity.
As we move my grandparents into their penultimate apartment, we unpack ornaments that might make it feel closer to home. We place a glazen Buddha on the shelf, its palm up in the mudra of teaching. Halmuni gifts me another Buddha head dusted lavender grey, saying she doesn’t need so many things. The order of their belongings shrank with each move, and those were many.
She was not so sentimental, sometimes tossing the tchotchkes we brought her on our travels. Mom rescued them if she arrived in time to detect the discarded act. One day last summer, she found the rest of Haba’s clothes in the kitchen trash bin, overflowing. For my grandmother, it was a gesture of mourning and practicality. Seeing his belongings on the other side of the room continued to sadden her – a reminder that he was gone, that she was lonely.
13 months later, we begin to pack again for Halmuni’s final move. She dismisses most momentos one by one, until I bring her a final frame. It is a small black and white photo of her and a friend, smiling in the youth of their early 20’s. It sat on the entryway table as aides passed through each day. They often asked us if it was her. She was beautiful. She still is.
We knew little about the photo, only that it contained a friend and a past not spoken to. To my surprise, it meets her cutoff. This is the only photo she keeps.
The friend in the photo was Anna, we learn when Aunt Robin comes to visit. Anna Shin, the one who charted the plan: they would marry American G.I.’s and move to the United States. Beauty was survival, a ticket out of a post-war country. They left Seoul in 1953 and arrived in the Midwest.
Halmuni traveled to the U.S. alone, stepping out at the bus station to meet her new in-laws in a smart suit, heels, and hat with handbag to match. She and Anna would visit each other the distance across Michigan and Missouri. She took a greyhound one day, stepped up to a bus segregated by color and asked the conductor where she should sit. I can only imagine he was stumped by this young Korean woman standing five feet tall. He pulled down the jumpseat to his right. You can sit right here.
We find her and Anna’s photo again in the box, three months unopened, as Mom gathers Halmuni’s belongings from the group home. The funeral home director has given us instructions that we can send special objects with her in the cremation, provided they are not fireworks, gas canisters, or other hazards prone to explosion.
What do you think of this photo? She seemed to like this one. Its history gives us pause. I wonder aloud what is best to carry into the afterlife, or to set away for a new beginning.
We keep the photo aside. Instead, we find a circle of prayer beads tucked away in her purse beside her wallet and a tiny bamboo mimikaki. Mom brings it to the crematory alongside sunflowers, our letters, and a wish folded into a paper crane. She slips the beads onto Halmuni’s wrist and sends it up with her, into the smoke and the air.
Sunday is the third day since Halmuni has begun to wean off food and onto morphine. Uncle John comes to pay his respects in the morning. He has always had a striking resemblance with Haba, just 11 years younger but with an alternating buzzcut or ponytail.
He had been excommunicated from the Park brothers long ago, had not seen my grandparents in years. He did not visit in Haba’s final days, nor on the 49th day after. Perhaps he thought it would be unwanted, a final affront to his brother’s sanctity. Instead he texted three words to us, our first teaching: Namu Amita Bul.
He arrives on Sunday promptly on time, just as Haba would have, and greets Halmuni softly in Korean. She does not respond outwardly. It is the third day since she has settled into a relative silence. But they say she can hear us – our hearing is one of the last senses to leave.
I was happy that he could offer a message in her first language. Over the recent years, she would occasionally lapse back into Korean, sometimes with no distinguishment between English, Korean, and Japanese. We had always spoken with her in English, and this served a mild slap to reality. I now wonder what she simply did not express to us, because of what the language could not hold.
Perhaps this has been part of the devastation – a fear that in this last and crucial window, we could not meet her in her chosen tradition. A final blow to all that we could not ask, could not understand, would never know.
We sit a while longer around her bed, Uncle John perched in a foldout walker next to the pulsing oxygen machine. Like Halmuni, he has alternated between religions – originally Buddhist, baptised Catholic, and now somewhere in between. But he shrugs. Don’t I look more like a Buddhist? On his left forearm, he shows me the tattoos of his Dharma name and Korean name, inked beside the visage of a woman he had loved, her hair flowing and breasts bare.
He tells us that at the tail of Mu Ryang San, Dancing Dragon Mountain, there is a temple there. In these mountains of Ulsan, generations of the Park family lay to rest. I realize it is his and Haba’s generation where the pattern breaks – just like an X drawn through their birth papers in the Korean government’s records of our family tree.
Originally, our family is Buddhist, he tells us. We are Buddhist.
It rings like a remembering.
On the 8th day after her passing, I wake in the early morning and cannot go back to sleep. It was not very explainable — I had gotten the least rest the night prior, as we woke early for the temple and Halmuni’s 7th day ceremony. Only with a bit of lucidity do I realize that these hours marked a full week since her last night on this earth — the hours of awakeness I had wished for, only 7 days too late.
I spent those 7 days mostly in silence — phone off, lighting a prayer and meditating each day. The dailiness of a modern environment, its distractions and chores and the constancy of it all, felt maddening and inescapable. It made me want to wish myself to a place where it could all melt away.
In the passing of those early hours, I give myself permission to return to my ego. I had been struggling in a limbo somewhere between meditation and prayer. Acceptance and grief felt at odds with each other, and I was caught in between.
I find myself wanting to sweat, to return to the temazcal. There is a parallel tradition in the Korean hanjeungmak — saunas historically fashioned from burning pine and domes of stone, and maintained by Buddhist monks. The outpost of the tradition today has evidently been converted into the Korean spa.
We settle for the sole Korean bathhouse in the Vegas area, and drive 12 miles up to Flamingo on Friday early evening. The baths are lukewarm, and the only other visitors are tourists passing time after a hotel check-out off the Strip. But there is a room with wood benches and a small portal, puffing the room full of pine. I enter, and place myself directly in front of the steam.
My mother’s brother passed away in 2009 with lung cancer. My last memory of him is from a family reunion in Huntingdon Beach, the first and only one in my lifetime. The adults must have known this was coming, planned it so we could all be together at least once. It was a significant occasion, not least because it is the trip where an ocean wave tipped me over and dislocated my knee. My Uncle Chuck was the one to get me, running into the waves and scooping me up so we could return to shore. An ER visit later, my knee remained swollen to the size of a coconut for the rest of the day.
He passed away in Honolulu, where he and his family were living at the time. The immediate kin traveled to be there for the days leading up and following. Halmuni was in anguish. His death muted her. She emerged, never the same.
Halmuni swore to stay the 49 days following at the temple in Palolo Valley, named Mu-Ryang-Sa for its broken ridge. It was an old tradition, where one stayed and prayed for the safe passage of their loved one across the 49 day journey to the beyond.
I later learn she broke all the rules during her stay, requesting the family bring her rations of Lay’s potato chips and original Coca-Cola, full sugar. She was given a grand beautiful room for the duration of her visit, and she filled it each day with curls of cigarette smoke. When they picked her up at the close of the 49 days, her first demand was for meat. They went for hamburgers, and she complained of the trials of beansprouts and a vegetarian diet on one’s digestion.
In the days of her transitioning, it occurs to me to begin preparing as if for ceremony: no caffeine, no alcohol, no meat. I begin to wonder if I could, if I should, carry out the 49 days for her, just as she had done for Uncle Chuck. It feels both jinx to think ahead, and necessary to manifest the option. I decide to wait until I can consult with the monk. It had been over a year since we had last seen her, when she performed the 49th day ceremony for Haba last spring. I text her on a Sunday asking if she would visit Halmuni, and she agrees to come that same week.
There is a memory of me at about one year old, walking with Halmuni to a temple for the first time. We walked beneath the rooftop’s wings and stood on the temple’s stone platform. It overlooked what felt like a vast lookout at the top of the hill, sloping into winding trees.
It was in 1994 when news spread throughout the Korean temple community. A temple in the Jogye order had been erected in the mountains of Tehachapi, California, and was now open for visiting. Mom recounts waiting in the car as Haba and Halmuni offered their respects — a short while until they said, gaja. Let’s go.
I hear this word for the first in a long time at Haba’s viewing at the crematory. Halmuni shuffles to Haba, holds his hand. He’s so cold. Like ice. She pauses. The suit you picked out is very nice. Pause. When they gonna cremanate him? Mom clarifies that they are waiting for the permits, that it won’t be today. Gaja. Let’s go.
It is for Haba’s 49th day ceremony that we get in touch with the temple in Tehachapi again. With some Googling in the immediate days of his passing, searching for Korean Buddhist temple options had drawn up blanks. Mom found a Thai temple in the Vegas area willing to perform the 7 day ceremony. The monks are hospitable, they say we can come sit for prayer anytime. They guide us into a hallway connecting the main hall and backrooms, and we talk at the mouth of a kitchen. A shadow shimmers behind me.
The visit ends with me inevitably in tears, wanting Haba to have a tradition closer to his own for the 49th day. From somewhere, comes the memory of the temple in Tehachapi. I wonder if we can find it, if it’s still there. I find the website and phone number online — all in Korean, but evidently still operating. A woman picks up on the first ring.
Yesterday was the 100th day since Halmuni passed from this earth.
They say there is a window of 49 days for a soul to pass through, from this life into the beyond. Some families observe for more, and some souls move with less. I feel Halmuni may have moved on quickly. Perhaps even before the 7th day, she was gone. In her final moments, tears streamed like I’ve never seen. Those last days in limbo, caught between here and the world of spirit and memory, were maybe enough of a plunge into the past — that she had had enough, that she was ready. Gaja. Let’s go. Like a flame dissolved to smoke.
In her lifetime, she chose her country, her marriage, her faith, her name. She traveled alone the distance from Seoul to the Midwest; she left a good-for-nothing marriage behind. She crossed out the names that didn’t suit her, made a fire in the backyard and burned photos of a life that was no longer hers. One day, she walked off the streets of Los Angeles and into a temple. She chose it as her own.
Across these 49 days, I am coming to understand that what she gave us is not an inheritance of tradition, but the inheritance to choose. It is the gift that we make this life — we decide what we carry with us and what we leave behind.
I am still choosing how I remember, and in what I believe. There is so much that cannot fit in small spaces. But for these 100 days and more, I am choosing to write.
Halmuni, we love you forever. May you be safe, happy, healthy, and free.
Chung Cha Park, 1932 - 2023
