Stay Soft, Stay Open

This episode is about all the times I put off the decision and the dream to move to Korea. There is so much isolation in the displacement of immigration. Death wakes us up to our lives.

This episode is about revisiting memories of all my trips to Korea that I've ever taken, and 할머니 and 하라보지 visiting us in America in 2000 when I was in 6th grade, and how they lived with us for several months in Virginia.

This episode is about watching 웰컴투 삼달리, Welcome to Samdal-ri, and seeing the stories of grief woven into the series, and the need to see the specificities of Korean grief outside of my own experience.

This episode is about our super and our friend, Cooper. I miss him, his presence, his smile, his music, his cooking. I miss doing life together with him.

This episode is about me processing all of my feelings about our July Korea trip, three months after our July Korea trip — the grief, the overwhelm, the massive feelings of longing and missing my family and my home.

This episode is about driving back and forth between New York and Virginia every weekend for two months because I needed to have our family together after death broke our family, and I was struggling to live apart and away from 엄마.

This episode is about my plans for 아빠's 2-Year Death Anniversary and the anticipatory grief I was feeling leading up to the anniversary.

This episode is about the difficulties of the month, and the trauma of September 2023 coming back up two years later, in September 2025. I can't unmarry the worst days of my life from September. As much as I wanted to reclaim September, I wish I had instead given myself permission to be a human being. September was a pressure cooker. I put so much pressure on myself, society puts so much pressure on mothers, and I was crushed under all of that pressure.

This episode is about the impossible weight of September, the massive grief I'm carrying, and all of the big mile-marker days of our lives — Haejoon's 돌잔치 (9/13), Haejoon's 돌 (9/15), Greg's and my five-year wedding anniversary (9/20), my 37th birthday (9/21), 아빠's two-year death anniversary (9/26), and 엄마's 64th birthday (9/27).

This episode is a summarization of the final days of my Korea trip.

Day 19: We packed all of our things into my family's cars, we went to church, we drove out to 교동도, we rode the monorail at 화개정원, and we went to 교동도 대룡시장, and we drove back to 파주. We ate 삼겹살 together, and we stayed at a hotel.

Day 20: We got rescued from the hotel by our family. We went to a 찜질방 and I hated it. We all got haircuts, and we got moved to a pension in the countryside of 파주. This was our last day in Korea.

Day 21: We spent time together with my family during the day. I looked out the window at the mountains and cried. We said goodbye to my family at the airport. We flew back to America.