This isn’t a typical blog for me, but I feel a need to write it here–to start 2007 with this. Thanks for bearing with me.

I woke up feeling disoriented this morning. For the last three days I’ve been in bed or on the couch with the worst head cold. But that’s not why I felt disoriented.

Since I was a little girl, New Year’s Day has been about bowing to Halmoni (my Korean grandmother). All the extended family gathers together, the women make big pots of dumpling soup, and then after we eat, we begin a tradition of bowing to our elders. My oldest uncle and aunt start, and after each one bows, Halmoni speaks a blessing over them for the year to come. Every one bows to Halmoni from the oldest adult to the youngest child as a way of paying respect. As little kids, we would opt for the money instead of the blessing, and as an adult I found myself wanting, valuing her blessing.

But Halmoni’s been gone for over three years, and our family hasn’t gathered together since. We’ve just done our own thing on New Years, and I think that for some this is the way of grief. So after much crying today, I decided to go to her grave site and bow again. Brian offered to take the kids swimming, and to my surprise, at the last minute, Pascaline jumped out of the car because she wanted to come with me.

My dad met me and Pascaline at Halmoni’s grave site, and as the rain fell the three of us unfolded a bamboo mat and layed it on the wet grass. I showed Pascaline how a Korean woman bows, and when she was ready the three of us, three generations, side by side, bowed to Halmoni’s grave site on the rain soaked bamboo mat. I then turned and asked Pascaline if she wanted to bow with me to my dad.

My dad sat up proud, not noticing the heavy rain, and my daughter and I bowed together. We must have been a site for any other visitor at the cemetery today. A woman and her child, bowing on a bamboo mat, to an older man sitting on the wet grass next to his mother’s headstone. What a site indeed.

As I heard my dad speak a blessing over us, I could see the piles of shoes at the front door, I could almost smell the dumpling soup, and hear the screams and giggles from all the cousins running wild, and I could feel Halmoni’s warm hand on my head as she spoke a blessing over me while I listened to my dad interpret her words. It all felt alive again as if nothing had ever changed, and the disorientation I’d been feeling all day slipped away.

I am only half Korean. My daughter is only a quarter Korean. And it’s hard to fight off the fear that someday these traditions will be forever lost. And yet, in the end I guess it’s not as much about being Korean, or even about losing the one who seemed to bring us all together. It’s about remembering and holding on to what we treasure even if it looks different than the way it did before. New is okay.

This is not how I had pictured starting the New Year. And yet I can’t imagine starting the New Year any other way.