Surprised by Grief, Soothed by Korean Television Drama

My father passed away in his sleep on August 28, 2016. He was surrounded by his two daughters, his youngest sister, and Geraldine, his caregiver of the past four years. Except for the fact that he was in a hospital bed, with a roommate who spent the night expectorating vigorously, his death was as easy as one could hope for. He had taken ill suddenly; he was not in pain; he was quietly fading away in his sleep, and we were keeping watch over him. When he slipped away, there was a choked sob or two, but for the most part this was, for all parties, a good death: peaceful for my father, guilt-free for us. We had done all we could have done. We had no regrets.

This was the fourth time death had entered my life and the first where I felt at peace with its surreptitious incursion. No doubt, death’s arrival was unexpected—we had, until he came down with a respiratory infection, thought our father strong enough to live for another decade—but it was not so unexpected as to shock us. He was eighty-one and a long-time diabetic. I was prepared for an uncomplicated grief.

My emotional ties to my father were lighter and less fraught than they had been with my grandmother and mother. I was fond of him—he was a charming, cheeky rogue—but he did not quite feel like a father to me. In his later years, as blindness had shrunk his world to his bedroom, he seemed more like a mischievous pet that I had been tasked with looking after and spoiling. His world revolved around himself, and I was seldom of real interest to him except perhaps as a source of income—but whatever resentment I had against him, I had dealt with a long time ago. I expected some sadness; I did not expect a spell of madness.

It was not a full-on frenzy, more a startling loss of internal footing. I felt unhinged, unbalanced, unusually nihilistic. As I teetered, I fell down a most unlikely rabbit hole: Korean television drama.

Since 2000, Korean dramas had swept through