A dead little girl says: I am the one who explodes with horror in the lungs of the living. Take me away from here right now.
-Antonin Artaud
My little anchovy— I remember my grandfather calling me over with a frown & a pinch of a smile, like he could taste the salty burst in his mouth when he said it. I was a skinny little girl then, who didn’t look left & right before running across the street & plunging into his arms.
Sunday, September 14, 2025 was the last time he called me this over the phone, because suddenly on Wednesday, July 29, 2026, he couldn’t stand upright after having an early breakfast, tumbled down to the floor, & never regained consciousness. The last time I heard his voice was 318 days before he died because during the many days in between last September & almost August of this year, I never called him. I tell myself I hadn’t called because I had no doubt he would be alive when I finally called, but this is a lie. I knew all along that old people die, often without any warning. I was not under the illusion that he was an exception to mortality.
At the neighborhood Catholic church he visited every day for morning Mass, the funeral took place the day after he was pronounced dead at the hospital. The church kept vigil overnight until the next day. About the length of the vigil, I had no clue how long it was supposed to be, but I thought one night was too short for everyone to say their goodbyes. Perhaps the heatwave in Seoul made it difficult to keep his casket open for longer. From the vigil to Mass, almost two hundred people attended, people who probably knew him for his likability & his love for his granddaughter, whom he often brought to church. They all asked me if I was you, reported my sister from the funeral home, waiting for our grandfather to come out in an urn. I realized my self-centeredness when my sister said it quite gracefully, like it didn’t matter to her that no one assumed the grieving young woman at church might be the other grandchild who actually stuck around. A bit astounded by her composure, I didn’t think to ask what she was feeling then. The truth is that I knew my grandfather for his likability & his love for me. I have no idea how others perceived him, what made them cry in front of his casket.
It seems a popular presumption that the funeral is the pinnacle of sorrow. That the greatest overwhelm of sorrow occurs when the deceased has been dead only a couple of days, when you are struggling to accept what is fresh, but the mourners & the priests & the family members around you effectively confirm this new reality, & you must adjust. In Seoul, Korea, on Thursday, July 30th, 2026, when my grandfather’s funeral took place, I was in New York, about 6,900 miles away. No one around me was crying or talking about him. No doctor telling me they did everything they could, but it was too late. No dead man anywhere I could see. At least in New York, there was no proof that he died. On the train, an older woman handed me some tissue when she saw me crying. I wondered if she could guess that my grandfather had died, but she could’ve thought I’d been dumped, or diagnosed with cancer, or lost my job. Even a couple of weeks after the funeral, I found myself disconnected from what I was told had happened. I haven’t talked to him in 10 months & nothing has changed. I didn’t talk to him in July, but I didn’t talk to him in June or May or April either. So what does it matter that he can’t pick up my calls anymore?
Instead of taking a flight to Seoul, I went on vacation as planned. On Wednesday, he died, & by Friday, he was burned to ashes & I was on a plane to Canada. At the small lake town in Quebec with A & his family, I was constantly preoccupied with a sound around my ear: in the kitchen, at the dock, & on the paddle board, even in the presence of other people—My little anchovy—in his warm voice & typical cadence—How’s everything? Despite the infrequency of our conversations since my moving to America in 2019, my grandfather’s voice was strikingly familiar. I understood this was simply a phenomenon of grief, although hearing a dead person’s voice everywhere can be defined as an auditory hallucination, a typical symptom of psychosis. I thought perhaps it was only as mildly regressive & alarming as having an imaginary friend as an adult. But on a kayak in the middle of the dark lake, under all the blooming stars I could never see in the city, the apocryphal metaphor of dead people as stars was stuck in my face like a butcher’s knife. As his starlit voice followed my trail on the kayak, I kept thinking that I must learn something from this. My life couldn’t possibly stay the same as before he died. He meant something to me, & now he was gone. He was there when I first opened my eyes to the blinding lights of the delivery room. He was there before I could speak or walk. The sound of his voice was etched into the most primal associations with my being alive. How can something so historic, so fundamental, no longer be? Just vanish?
Upon returning to New York, I found myself summoning his voice because it stopped following me around my ear. The particularities of his voice had begun to soften, so I thought to self-administer this auditory hallucination. I repeated it over & over again, everywhere I went: My little anchovy. But it eventually stopped sounding so familiar. He sounded made up.
My grandfather was 20 years old when he was fulfilling his mandatory military service, interrupted by a deployment to Vietnam in 1965. I learned about his part in the army & the war through my grandmother’s complaint that he didn’t collect the government pension he was entitled to. He never spoke, either anecdotally or philosophically, about the time he was a soldier. About her father, my mother didn’t share much, only that he was broke from loaning money to friends he shouldn’t have trusted & investing in businesses he shouldn’t have invested in. He was irresponsible & naive about money, which my mother took as a failure toward his children, & he never claimed the money he deserved as a veteran, which left my grandmother feeling confused & stonewalled. There was a part of him that was unreasonably stubborn, & no one quite understood why.
For as long as I remember him, he was devoted to his church. A small Catholic Church with several ping-pong tables in the basement & a decently sized front yard with a garden. I never got the impression that he was charismatic— he rarely made jokes & didn’t stand out as witty. He was, however, always curious about what anyone was up to, loved children & their parents, buying them ice cream, loved older people who lived far away from their children, giving them rides to the hospital for their appointments, loved a good game of ping-pong in the basement with his friends & sharing every meal of the day with his wife. He was perhaps the only adult in my life who didn’t offer any advice or opinion as to what I should do or how I should be.
Missing him feels so far away, but not because I was 6,900 miles away from the funeral. A few days after the funeral, I called my grandmother, & despite losing the man she’d been married to for nearly 60 years, she was coherent & asked me not to cry, as he was in heaven. I never quite knew how to express, or not to express, my lack of interest in being a Catholic to my grandparents. I turned out to struggle with having faith in anything, be it God or man, & going to boarding school was a convenient excuse to never go to church with my grandparents again. I wanted to go to Madison Avenue Presbyterian after work & light a candle for my grandfather, but I couldn’t get myself to go in. I wouldn’t know what to do in there, where to sit, how much to pay for the candle. My grandmother told me he always wanted his ashes to be buried under a tree, but he was now at the veterans’ memorial instead. My father had insisted they don’t bury him under a tree. She sounded appreciative when she said my dad had taken care of all the arrangements & the costs. In an instant, it was transparent to me that the veterans’ memorial meant something important to my dad, who volunteered to the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps in college in addition to his mandatory military service. He talked of the army as the place that made him a man despite never being a ranking officer. My dad had never fought a war or killed a man, but he was a soldier in his mind. I felt a stinging sensation in my chest when I redundantly pointed out to my grandmother that her husband never uttered a single word about Vietnam. But he’s right by the window at the memorial, getting a lot of sun, she said. She sounded exhausted.
Missing him feels so far away because, in a way, he was already dead in August 2019 when I left him & the rest of my family for a new life 6,900 miles away. He was there when I first opened my eyes to the blinding lights of the delivery room, & he was there before I could speak or walk, but so were my mom & dad. The sound of their voices was also etched into the most primal associations with my being alive, & my goal for the past 84 months has been to live without it. Every waking minute of my new life, I convinced myself that I was whole without their voices, that I was, in fact, more alive without them. As I learned how to live without my parents, I also learned how to live without my grandparents, my sister, & my childhood friends. I set fire to the whole house because I was young & didn’t know any other way. This was the cost of everything all along— I could never grieve in accordance with time. Whenever I lose anyone, it would be a delayed realization that they’d already been dead a while, a terrifying reflection of myself in the mirror, permanently half grieving & half broken, haunted by the question of my culpability in all this misery: Why did you burn the house down in the first place?
Only as the consequences of my choices confront me do I begin to truly accept that everything will not even out at the end. There isn’t always an upside or a greater meaning to things. Holding onto the sound of his voice saying My Little Anchovy, I was only trying to soothe my aches, relieve myself of accountability, & clumsily look forward instead of inward. My grandfather’s death wasn’t meant to bring healing or enlightenment, & I regret everything. What I would’ve said to him if I knew a day earlier that he would die— I don’t know. What I would’ve done differently if I knew 7 years ago that he would die on Wednesday, July 29, 2026— I don’t know.