Long weekend

This past week, my family went to visit my grandfather in Chicago. He turned 89 in June (in Korean years, because of the way they calculate birthdays, which is based on the New Year, rather than your actual birthday, and no, I don't fully understand it myself, he's 90), and he called my mother a couple of months ago and asked her to come to Chicago and take the things from his apartment that she wanted before he called her brothers and told them to do the same thing. My mother has been crying nearly every day since.

I could only go from July 2-5 (unfortunately, the script won't write itself), but my sister is there until tomorrow, and my parents will be there until Tuesday. My grandfather hasn't been completely independent in a while, but he was able to go to Korea for a visit a couple of years ago with my mom, and he and I had dinner the night that the drunk driver nearly killed me last year (was it the year before?). I wasn't completely prepared for how much his quality of life has deteriorated.

He has to use a walker to get from the bed in the living room, where he watches Korean tv, to the bathroom in his tiny apartment. For longer trips, he has a wheelchair. He's diabetic, and he has Parkinson's, so he has to take a lot of medication 3-4 times a day. My aunt has hired a couple in their 50s and 60s to take care of him on a daily basis and get him to doctor's appointments, and there are other specialists who come on a weekly basis for things like a bath (I think showering alone is difficult for him) or therapeutic massage. It's difficult for him to sit unsupported for long stretches of time. And a lot of times he zones out because it takes too much energy for him to pay attention and participate in conversation. He hasn't lost his mental faculties -- he's still as sharp as ever. He is truly zoning out because he's tired.

My mother has two brothers in the Chicago area. One does kind of a half-baked job looking in on him and visiting with him, and the other one, the oldest of my mother's three brothers, doesn't even bother to try. In past years, when all of us would get together, and Grandpa was in much better health, at least one dinner would involve my mother (who's the oldest) and my uncles and my aunt reminiscing, which would devolve into complaining about all the unhappy memories they have from their childhood. My grandfather is the kind of person who made sure that all of his family's basic needs were met, and then he would use any leftover money to help people less fortunate than they were. My mother and her siblings have varying levels of resentment over this, but it's particularly acute in my uncles. They blame my grandfather for not giving them a better start in life, and so now, they don't take care of him. It enrages my mother, my aunt, my sister, and me, but my mother and my aunt have done everything she can to try to force my uncles to do the right thing, and they won't.

The rage is exacerbated by the knowledge that while my grandfather probably doesn't have much time left, he would have more if his spirits were higher, which they would be if he saw his family more often. He doesn't have the ability to see any of his friends, who I think have all predeceased him anyway, so all he has left is family. My parents are in Dallas, my sister is in Austin, and I'm in Houston. I should have done a much better job visiting him over the past 5 years, as often as I'm in Chicago for work. I don't really have a good excuse, except that the language barrier is really hard, and it's not easy to get to his place and back to work in a time-efficient manner. Really lame. Really just about as lame as being resentful about a crappy childhood.

I asked my dad why my parents don't move him to Dallas. He said that it's partly that Grandpa's doctors and caregivers, all of whom are Korean, are in Chicago, and partly it's that he gets a lot of assistance from the State of Illinois, a lot more than he would get from the State of Texas. My sister says that it's also partly because my dad doesn't want to live with his father-in-law. I didn't ask about that issue because I'm not ready to see my dad as being that selfish. I understand that my grandfather is not an easy man to live with, and that it would be uncomfortable having someone senior to you in the Korean pecking order living in your own house, but like I said, my grandfather doesn't have much time left.

Something I always wanted to do was to ask my grandfather to tell some stories of his childhood, so they could be written down somewhere, not necessarily as a book to be published, but just as something for my family to have. There's a picture of my great-grandparents in Grandpa's apartment, and my mother told me that Grandpa was the last of 3 boys, which I knew. What I didn't know is that he was the youngest by about 8 or 9 years, and that when he was born, his mother was so malnourished that her breast milk wasn't very nourishing, either. I guess there wasn't much food in general -- my grandfather was 4 or 5 before he was able to walk. These are the stories that I wish I had learned enough Korean to ask him about myself.

My grandfather and his brothers may have been the most enlightened men in Korea for their generation. My mother is the oldest of five; it's her, the rotten uncle, my uncle in New Mexico, my superstressed uncle, and then my aunt. During their childhood, it would have been really easy for my grandfather to focus all of his resources on educating his sons and ignoring the education of his daughters. But instead, he said regardless of whether you're a boy or a girl, I have an obligation to make sure you have the same opportunities for education.

I always thought that was the influence of my grandmother, who was a teacher. (I'm pretty sure my uncles would be taking better care of my grandparents if she were still alive, but she died the year before I graduated from high shcool. She was the one person in the whole world who was always on my side no matter what and thought that I could do no wrong. My mother has always looked young for her age, but when my grandmother passed away, my mother's face aged 10 years overnight.) When I visited Portland a couple of weeks ago, though,(and I keep meaning to post with some photos), my second cousin Christine told me some stories of her grandfather, the middle brother, that make me think that my grandfather and my great uncles were generations ahead of their time. Christine's mother is the oldest of 8 (I think), and her father made sure she went to college as well. Not only that, but when Aunt Ellen (Ul-bin Emo) looked around after she graduated, she saw that there weren't many opportunities beyond teaching for a college-educated woman in Korea, and so she looked west to the US. My great uncle was a banker, but after the Korean war, all the money was confiscated, so he scraped together enough money for a one-way ticket to the US and told her she had to make it.

I wish I'd actually made an effort to collect stories like this from my grandfather. I'm going to ask my mom to help with this. Maybe it will give him a sense of purpose that will help him want to live. His doctors say that even though he has some issues, his health is ok, and he could live for a few more years. I wish there were something more I could do.