On anticipatory grief, the house that holds them, and the people who are my entire world
There are nights — not every night, but particular ones, the kind that arrive without warning on an otherwise ordinary evening — when I lie awake on the third floor and listen to nothing.
The building is three stories, and each floor lives behind its own door. Iron, the way residential buildings are in Korea — where you share a gate, share a courtyard, share a stairwell, and then the door closes and each household becomes entirely its own. My parents on the first floor. A man who rents on the second. Me on the third. Sound does not travel through those walls. On these particular nights, the house is completely silent in every direction, and I am aware, in a way that is not comfortable, that I cannot hear them at all.
That inability is, I have come to understand, the whole problem.
My parents are in their seventies, my mother just past seventy and my father a few years older. They sleep less than they used to. This is what my mother told me when I asked: we sleep less now. Not with complaint — as a statement of fact, the way someone reports a change in the weather. I took it in without comment. Later I thought about it for a long time.
On these particular nights, lying in the silence, I become aware of a need I cannot act on from where I am: I need to know they are still there. Not in an abstract sense. I need the evidence that requires a body in a room. I need to go downstairs.
So sometimes I do. Under a pretext I do not examine too closely — I forgot something downstairs, I need to check something that could easily wait until morning. I open my door, step into the shared stairwell, and descend. I know the code on their door. The first floor and the third share one, a detail that never meant much to me and now means everything. I let myself in. They hear me on the stairs, or at the door. My mother is there, or my father, or both, and we exchange a few words. The soft percussion of the refrigerator. A door drawn closed rather than shut. These sounds, from inside their space, are what I came for. After a while I go back upstairs.
And as I climb the stairs, something cold moves through me.
The evidence expires quickly. Already, before I reach the third floor, I am relying on memory. Already the visit is receding into something I heard and cannot hear now.
The door will not always open. One day the floor will not creak with their weight.
By six in the morning, before I have slept, my father will be on the roof. This is his daily practice: up before anyone else, climbing past my floor to the terrace where he tends the plants he has accumulated over years — pots of various sizes, herbs and flowers and things I’ve never learned the names of, arranged along the railing with the attention of someone who has chosen this as his morning work. He waters them. He adjusts their positions in relation to the early light.
My father has been working since before I can remember. For most of my childhood, he ran a small electronics shop in a Daegu market alley — a narrow storefront that opened earlier than the neighboring shops and closed later, where he sold what he sold and then left the counter to my mother when construction work called him away. Electrical work was the main income; the shop was where my mother sat while he was on-site. They came home after ten most nights. This was simply the pattern of things, unbroken for decades.
He retired approximately ten years ago. He still picks up part-time work through a government employment program for seniors — small tasks, modest hours, the kind of thing you do to have somewhere to be. But his real occupation now, I have come to understand, is the rooftop. He is up there when the neighborhood is still quiet, doing something small and consistent and unhurried, and I have found myself recently unable to hear him moving overhead — those footsteps on the stairs, the only sounds that travel through this building freely — without feeling something I cannot precisely name: not exactly gratitude, not exactly grief, but something that contains both.
The plants are alive because of his attention. This is a simple fact. It lands differently now than it would have when I was twenty.
There is a particular form of grief that has no name I know of, though I have looked for one. It is the grief of anticipation — the grief that arrives before the loss, that moves into the body like weather, that sits alongside ordinary life without displacing it entirely, so that you can be laughing at something one moment and in the next be stopped cold by a thought you were not expecting. Philosophers have written about death in the abstract. Poets have written about loss after the fact. But there is a space between those two things — the knowledge that loss is coming and the experience of it arriving — that is harder to talk about, because talking about it seems, in some superstitious way, like inviting what you fear.
My earliest memory of the house I grew up in is not a memory of my parents in it. It is a memory of absence: the television going, the early evening light, and Tobi beside me on the floor.
Tobi was a Maltese. Small, white, with the particular quality of stillness that certain dogs develop when they’ve been kept by a solitary child — they learn the rhythms of waiting, the specific temperature of an empty room. He lived for nineteen years and several months, which is a long time for any creature and felt, when he died, like the end of an era I hadn’t known was an era until it was over. I was in my mid-twenties then.
What I remember from those early years is the two of us in the old house — a hanok, in a cluster of similar houses, the kind of neighborhood that held its shape for decades and then did not. The shop closed, the tools were packed, the market alley emptied out, and eventually the sound of the gate at ten o’clock. The specific sound of my father’s footstep on the path. The particular way my mother called out when she entered.
That neighborhood is gone now. The houses were cleared for redevelopment, and the land sat unfinished for a long time. Some of the adjacent lots still look like ruins. My parents took the compensation money and everything they had managed to save over those years of the market alley — every late evening, every construction site, every day she spent behind that counter while he was on-site — and bought the house with the courtyard, the one with three floors and a rooftop.
The first time I came back to Daegu, years after I left, I went to the old address without thinking. I stood in front of where our courtyard had been and found a cleared lot instead. I hadn’t been in contact enough to know. I called my parents and they told me where to go.
I did not understand, then, what it meant to have a house you could lose. I do now.
I left when I was eighteen. Not exactly left — departed, in the way of someone who had been moving toward the door since sixteen. I was working nights by then, moving between cities, accumulating a network of people in an industry that runs on proximity and the particular loyalties that form in small hours. I came back in my early thirties. Not as a return to something I had been keeping in reserve — more like arriving at a place I had worn out other options in order to reach. There had been, in the years between, a specific kind of failure: a loss of money and trust, the kind that comes from believing in someone who turned out to be worth believing in only partially. When that settled, I found myself here again, in the house with the courtyard, on the top floor.
The house received me without comment. My parents did the same. I have never been entirely sure whether this was generosity or something older than generosity — the accommodation a home makes for whoever returns to it, because a home doesn’t know how not to.
My mother has lines around her eyes that were not there when I was young. Her walk has changed. She moves more carefully now. There are pauses between actions that did not used to be there. And sometimes, in an unguarded moment, I will catch her sitting still in a way that is not relaxed but vacant — a woman who has set something down and is not sure where it went.
She still cooks three meals a day for my father. This has not changed with retirement, with age, with the shifting of circumstances. Three meals, every day, as though maintaining this rhythm is itself a form of care for something larger than appetite. I watch her in the kitchen sometimes and think: she has done this for decades. She has done this without being asked and without complaint and probably without noticing that she is doing it, because the doing has become the structure of her days.
I find myself studying both of them. Taking inventory. The particular way my father’s hands look when he is tending something. The sound of my mother’s laugh, which comes from somewhere low in her chest. I am committing these things to memory without deciding to.
Children do not see their parents. They see parent — a role, a function, a climate. The possibility that they have fears of their own, a private exhaustion, a self that predates and exceeds their relationship to you — this does not occur to you. Or if it does, it does not land.
I remember the specific quality of the moment it finally landed for me. What I remember is the image: my mother sitting by a window, not doing anything in particular, and the particular absence of purpose in her posture — not the stillness of someone at rest, but the stillness of someone who has, for a moment, forgotten what they were supposed to be doing next. And the thought that arrived, almost involuntarily: she is tired. Not tired in the sense that she needed sleep. Tired in the deeper sense, the sense that accumulates over decades. And following that: and I have never really asked her about it.
I have not asked my father either. There is a version of him I know — the one who tends his plants, who does his part-time work, who has structured his retirement around small reliable duties — and I have never pressed past it to ask what he thinks about at the end of the day. Whether the years in the market alley felt like the life he would have chosen, or simply the life that was available. He is not a man who would answer such a question directly. I’m not sure I would know how to ask it.
I am their only child. This is a fact that has had different weights at different ages. At forty it has the weight of a specific arithmetic: when they are gone, there are no siblings to call. No family network to fall into. No one who knew them the way I knew them, who can say yes, I remember that about him too or she always did that, didn’t she. The loss, when it comes, will be complete in a way it isn’t for people who have someone to share it with.
I think about my friends sometimes — the ones who have lost parents already, or who will. One friend, whose father died a few years ago, has three older sisters, a wife, a daughter and a son. When the call came, there were people around him. The grief was enormous, I know — but it was held by others who were also grieving, who were also there, who could sit in the same room and not need to explain anything. Another friend lost his father recently, and he has an older sister, a wife, a life that is organized around other people who are also organized around him. The loss was real. But he was not alone in it.
I count mine. I count them every time.
Here is the thought that stops me when I let myself think it fully:
They worry about me.
It is one of the stranger loops of love — that the people you fear losing are simultaneously carrying their own version of this fear, and it is about you. They will almost certainly go before I do. But they carry their own weight of anticipatory grief, I think, and it is not about themselves. It is about what becomes of me after.
I have seen it in my mother’s face sometimes, when she is looking at me and does not know I am watching. A kind of shadow. Something that is not worry exactly but that operates at the depth where worry lives. I have seen it in the way my father sometimes pauses in the middle of doing something and looks at me with an expression I cannot fully read. Perhaps what a parent’s face does when they are measuring a distance they cannot close.
We are people in the same building, behind our separate doors, each carrying a fear that cannot be fully named to the other, because naming it would be a form of cruelty — would be forcing the other person to sit with something they are already sitting with alone. And so it goes unspoken, and the love that is also grief moves through the building the way air moves through a building: through every gap, silently, and everywhere.
What frightens me most, when I force myself to be precise about it, is not the moment itself.
It is the first Tuesday after. The ordinary mornings that will continue arriving. The breakfast that will need to be made and eaten. The world outside the window that will be going about its business with an indifference so complete it will feel like a kind of aggression. I will have to get dressed. I will have to answer messages from people who are not thinking about them. I will have to pass through time, hour by hour, day by day, carrying something that most of the people around me cannot see.
And there will be no one to call who lost what I lost. No one who understood the particular architecture of the people they were. The grief will be mine in a way that no one can share it, because no one else is in this position. This is what I mean when I say they are my entire world: not that I have no one else, but that they are the category of person I cannot replace or approximate or find again anywhere.
I went downstairs again last night.
There was no real reason. Nothing needed to be confirmed. But I opened my door and stepped into the stairwell anyway, and descended. Each step brought me closer. By the time I reached their floor I could hear it — something small, a movement on the other side of the door — and I entered the code. My mother was awake. She looked up when I came in. She asked if I was all right.
Fine, I said. Just couldn’t sleep.
She accepted this without comment, in the way she accepts most things. We stayed there for a few minutes, not talking about anything important. She asked if I had eaten. I said I had. She said she was about to go to bed. I said all right.
Walking back up, I paused on the landing. From here I could hear her — the small sounds of someone winding down an evening, moving through the space I had just left. These sounds carry only this far. One floor up and they are already gone.
I stood there longer than I needed to, in the range where I could still hear her.
In a few hours, from the floor above me, I will hear my father moving. He will pass my door on his way to the roof. He will begin his morning work with the plants — unhurried, consistent, the way of someone who has decided that this small and living thing will be cared for today. I have started to understand that his 6am is not so different from my 2am. Both of us awake while the building is sealed. Both of us attending to something we cannot afford to let go unattended.
There is something I have been slowly understanding, though I cannot say I have fully arrived at it: that love at this stage is not only the warm thing. It is also the heavy thing. It is the weight of what cannot be returned and what cannot be prevented and the weight of knowing both of these at once. It is the specific work of learning to be present in something that will not last, which is the same work that everything worth doing eventually requires.
They are here now. The building is quiet, but it is the quiet of people breathing on different floors. My father will be on the roof in a few hours. My mother is asleep on the first floor. Above them, I am awake.
I have always been the one who waits in this house. I waited as a child, in the hanok that no longer exists, with a small dog beside me, for the sound of the gate at ten o’clock. I am waiting now, in the house my parents spent their lives to own, for the sounds that mean they are still here — sounds I can only hear when I go to them.
One day I will enter the code and the floor will not creak with their weight.
Until then: somewhere below me, they are breathing. I know the stairs. I know the way.