In my Intro to Creative Nonfiction class, I wrote about my grandmother for my first piece. I wrote about her because she was dead, and nothing comes more naturally than remembering a person who no longer exists. 

I considered the woman my grandmother was. I talked about her food, her funeral, the people there I didn’t know who pretended they knew me, the festering realization that my grandmother had not been the all-sacrificing cooking angel I knew in my childhood. I expressed my regret at being unable to remember her food. I wrote, “I remember she atrophies until what remains are the bones only: bare and white and clean. I pray she turns them into broth.”

I added this line to my final draft and then gave myself a standing ovation. But in my first iteration of the piece, before two rounds of workshop, I had written in a reflective twist at the end of the piece. I’d since cut it because I didn’t think there was enough room to accommodate the implied gravity of this thematic extension: I’d accused myself, in the end, of eating from her table, of taking from her, until nothing was left. I’d said that I was taking away from her even now.

It was true. I was using my grandmother’s memory to write a three-page draft of a college assignment that would never see the light of day. I was using my experience of her death to squeeze out a piece of badly-written creative writing two hours before it was due. I had reached into myself for things I could plaster onto my professor’s prompt and hooked, unceremoniously, onto the most theatrical thing I had experienced, ever. Someone in my family had died. Someone who raised me had died. Someone who played dolls with me as we sat on the carpeted living room floor had died, and here I was: turning it into an assignment. 

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Ernest Hemingway tells us that writing is easy. You just have to sit down at a typewriter and bleed. All your little hurts, he advises, will become wells of sanguine ink that you need only dip into to churn out masterpieces like a machine. It’s tempting, as a writer, to translate pain into a story. Sadness is inspirational. Grief is generative. Artists apparently do their best work during the worst time of their lives. The depressed artist, the starving artist, the oppressed artist—there’s nary a creative great out there who hasn’t experienced some sort of personal trouble, and hell if they didn’t condense it into their art. 

It’s a masochistic impulse. You drive the knife deeper into yourself because others might enjoy the artistry of your agony. They will come watch your torment transcribed neatly into something visible, legible, comprehensible. James Baldwin, in Conversations with James Baldwin, writes that art is important because it’s a “great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone.” I don’t disagree with him. The list of personal crises I’ve worked through by turning to Sally Rooney—“Frances, are you planning to drown down there?”—is long enough that I truly do believe there’s a power in art that charts the path to healing, to empathy, to understanding yourself by understanding others, and vice versa. 

A Korean singer, Yim Jae-beom, said something in a variety show that has stuck with me for a while. It was a show where anonymous singers were invited to compete for fame, and Yim, a seasoned vocalist, served as one of the judges. One of the contestants had recently lost her mother, a fact she only revealed in later rounds. She shared this profound sense of loss with Yim himself—following his wife’s death in 2017, he disappeared from the public eye for five years. In his commentary about her performance, he says that “this pain that we feel in our bones is, as people who sing, a kind of resource… I think we must live with gratitude that our sadness has been given the opportunity to comfort that of others.” 

I watched this show in the fall of 2024, a few months after my grandmother passed away in July. I scribbled his comment in my journal, thinking that this was why I wrote. I wanted to turn my pain into something meaningful. I wanted to find meaning in my pain’s ability to console others, just as the art of those who came before had found me. How beautiful and noble was this ambition? I bore the cross. I would lie down on the operating table and drag the scalpel across my own stomach. I would perform a literary autopsy on myself: Here is the cause of death. Let me write it down for you. See if you can find yourself in the words. 

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My grandmother’s death was not a surprise. She had been sick for a long time, and it was an illness very few people recover from. 

I wrote a few lines about wheeling her into the hospital room on the eighth floor, and then deleted them. It was important to establish that my grandmother was dead for this piece to work, but I could not bring myself to turn the pain that was the process of her dying into words on a page. I had unearthed what I could from the fact of her death, and it seemed like an unforgivable transgression to exploit the process of it for just another story. 

I don’t think I’ll ever talk about that room. 

So let me consider something else: In the days that followed her death, I sat in a swivel chair at her funeral and thought about how I could turn this into a piece of writing. How couldn’t I? It was so… opportune. So pregnant with meaning. I told and told and told myself to shut the fuck up for once—but I couldn’t help it. In a month I would move halfway across the world. This was my first funeral ever. My grandmother had spooned rice into my mouth while I read books at the dinner table. I mean, she’d practically raised me. What was this if not a God-given metaphor for the way I would peel away bits of childhood from my life and become an adult? With-grandmother, without-grandmother. In-Korea, Out-of-Korea. Child, Adult. Younger, Older. 

A brilliant binary. 

I sat in that chair in mourning clothes and everyone hugged me and said, “At least she got to see you graduate.” Now wasn’t that a thought? My grandmother walking me to kindergarten versus sitting in bed watching me graduate on a YouTube livestream from the same K-12 school. Couldn’t that be a metaphor for something? There had to be a metaphor somewhere in there. What kind of death doesn’t leave a metaphor behind? 

We dip into the well of our suffering and absorb just enough material to create something identifiably sympathetic, but we can’t just write about it because let’s face it: no one really wants to hear about the hours I spent doing nothing in the funeral home. I watched reels. I went down the rabbit hole of derailed rollercoasters and deactivated animatronics and what-I-eat-in-a-day videos since I was stuck swallowing funeral food all day. In order for my grief to inhabit art, I had to extract meaning and emotion from it like a nurse draws out blood: regret at not going over often enough to eat her food, disappointment at the person she turned out to be to my relatives, shock at the sheer amount of Christians who showed up, horror at their religious zeal, guilt at turning the tale of her loss into a draft for ENGL0930. 

Kait Rokowski says, “Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red.” I turned the excruciating boredom of my three days at the funeral into writing. I contorted it into the form of poetry. I made it art. My grief had been meaningless until I imbued it with meaning. It was a pile of dirt until I excavated the metaphor within, a crude block of marble until I freed the sculpture begging inside. 

What was it that Hemingway wrote? Bleed words into the empty Google Docs? 

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And so I inflict wounds upon myself and turn it into ink. I write, in October 2024, about her death and the incoherence of it. I write, in January 2025, about the grief I must have felt. And I write now about… well, not necessarily her death, but it serves as the thread that braids my piece together. A happy resolution, you would think—writing as a coping mechanism, a productive (in both senses of the word) processing of loss. 

I didn’t cry once. 

In the poem “Jessica gives me a chill pill,” Angie Sijun Lou points out that “not everything feels like / something else.” But to me, everything has to feel like something else. Otherwise what would I write about? As it turns out, the knife with which you sacrifice yourself at the altar of artistic altruism is not only double-edged, but also plastic. In turning your pain into art, you chip away at your ability to feel it for what it is. You dull the edge. You numb the ache. 

I grieve the grief I lost somewhere in my search for meaning. And even that, you read.