Entrusted

RIDGEWOOD, N.J.—My grandfather built things. In a backyard somewhere in a low California valley, his treehouse subsumes a wimpy oak. The trunk seems to buckle underneath the weight of a wide staircase leading up to the habitable structure. But I imagine that this immemorial fixture of my childhood is now littered with alien toys, the once fresh carpet dank with spilled juice and the glass-paned windows smeared by the hands of gum-smacking children.

I’m left to imagine because I haven’t seen this treehouse for 16 years. Every time my family revisits the neighborhood, I’m forced to subsist on a teasing peek into the backyard. The sense of voyeurism hardens the feeling of having been cheated of what was once mine. That treehouse stands as a testament to a past built and lost by my grandfather.

For as long as I’ve been alive, he tried to fix my grandmother. Wihyun Yi: a name best sighed—and a woman who did just that for the 20 years I knew her. She died this past April, and it was the first time I saw brokenness in my carpenter grandfather. The morning before the day she was due to pass, I awoke to the sound of grief: the slow shuffling of feet across the splotched carpet of a home for two, the heaving of cushions as a body sinks into them, and the breaking of noise at the throat, low and awful. Perhaps he thought I was asleep.

Witnessing this weakness was jarring for someone who adored her grandfather in a way overawed children often do, that sort of spell-bound attachment to things that seem rare and superhuman. My annual summer visits to my grandparents’ California home had always promised new examples of his ingenuity: An apple tree he had recently planted with that plump fruit down there growing just for me, a nifty contraption for picking oranges that would later leave my lips raw and stinging from the acid, and ramps and pulleys of all kinds to ease my late grandmother’s mobility about the house.

He always wore a beret; he was never wrong. I was immensely proud of him—this man who created, who endowed agency, and who, above all, fixed people.

But when he arrived at my New Jersey home last month, I was appalled at how he seemed to cling onto me when we hugged, seeking out my shoulders and back like a blind man. He was thinner, the lines around the edges of his mouth tightly drawn and determined southwards. Offering my consolations months after we had all attended the funeral seemed void of sincerity, and I wanted, so badly, to give him more than my sympathy. I wanted him to feel, despite the death of a woman he had served with patience and grace for more than half a century, that he possessed significance for me, that he was responsible for the person I was today. I wanted to give him the agency he had lost.

But witnessing the grief of another is immobilizing—frustrating and trying if it’s the grief of someone you care about. My Korean was awful, and I couldn’t seem to do anything for him except insist that I sleep on the floor and he in my bed (the crusade failed). It seemed as though all I could do was watch him break.

But once my bedroom floor was swept clean of his presence, I began to wonder if I had thought it out all wrong. Perhaps people can be strong in the broken places, as Hemingway once intimated. Most importantly, perhaps we are only broken because we care for others—and maybe that makes the grief worth it. His was a life of sacrifice, one where you break because there is someone worth hurting for. And maybe this brokenness is exactly what makes my grandfather one of the few people I wholly admire.

On my dresser, my grandfather left behind a piece of paper folded four times over with the edges tucked underneath each other to form a miniature plait. It looks like a house. I think of it when I also think about what he told me a few days ago on the phone: “Inhae, live kindly.”

It’s not a mandate I presume to have fulfilled—in fact, it’s one I have flouted on more occasions than I like to admit. But he has entrusted me with this task, and I delight in the weight of its importance. That’s when I know that the past is not so lost. That’s when I know that he has fixed me—that we can only be whole because we break for each other.


Esther I. Yi ’11, a Crimson news writer, is a History and Literature concentrator in Dunster House.