{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-article-tsx","path":"/primetogether-alone","result":{"data":{"primeArticle":{"slug":"prime.together-alone","excerpt":"In the wake of losing her grandfather during the pandemic, writer Kate Green began to feel surprisingly closer to him.","headline":"Together, alone","author":"Kate Green","authorbio":"","authoremail":"","authortwitter":"","coverimg":"https://assets3.dailybruin.com/images/prime.together-alone/NEWfeatured-e3a24350460f809ef9408ef223ce3e54.jpg","covercred":"Ariana Fadel","coveralt":"Photo of Kate Green.","articleType":"article","updated":null,"content":[{"type":"text","value":"“I’ll drive us down to LA,” my older sister said. “I know we can’t spend time with him, but it’d be worth it to wave goodbye.”"},{"type":"text","value":"She was still dressed in the navy blue scrubs she wears to the clinic, having just finished her last day of work before time off for Christmas. Standing in the foyer, with the keys to her Toyota Corolla dangling from her pocket and a hand on her hip, she looked ready to go – prepared to immediately embark on the six-hour car ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles."},{"type":"text","value":"“We can’t, Em,” my mom replied. “They told us we shouldn’t try and visit.”"},{"type":"text","value":"My mother had waited for my sister, Emma, to return home before delivering the latest update on my maternal grandfather’s health. He was moving from a hospital to a nursing home to receive hospice care because of his rapidly accelerating dementia, and COVID-19 protocols barred us from seeing him. Despite this grim reality, the idea that his final days would be marked by loneliness, away from his familiar home and loved ones, felt unacceptable to us."},{"type":"text","value":"I found myself drifting away from the family conversation while Emma and my mom anxiously discussed the possibility of traveling to Los Angeles, exchanging whispered fears over my grandfather’s condition. I had nothing to add – no insight into the correct medical course of action for my grandfather, no plausible travel plans, no soothing words of reassurance. I left the dining room and spent that night trying to make myself useful by searching through boxes of photo albums and dusty binders in my garage, rummaging for pictures and records from my grandfather’s life."},{"type":"text","value":"We stayed in San Francisco, and a week later on Dec. 30, I received the news that my grandfather had passed away. The exact cause of death was not immediately pinned on COVID-19, but my family was told that he struggled with breathing and that the virus had spread to his vulnerable Los Angeles nursing home."},{"type":"text","value":"New Year’s was quiet, and I sat alone in my bedroom – a twistedly fitting end to a year defined by loss and isolation."},{"type":"text","value":"…"},{"type":"text","value":"My grandfather’s death was a sobering dose of perspective as I bid 2020 goodbye. I chastised myself for bemoaning the pandemic’s theft of trivial events before I knew what else it could take."},{"type":"text","value":"The cancellation of my senior prom was the first time I felt COVID-19 stole something from me. Early last spring, the gravity of the pandemic was only beginning to set in, and I basked in the naivety of a newly turned 18-year-old determined to achieve the perfect denouement to my high school story. The lockdown and death counts hadn’t fully set in, leaving me to daydream of corsages and photoshoots. I remained convinced that in just a few weeks I’d be dress shopping downtown and reserving a table for 10 at some fancy restaurant. When I found myself isolated at home on the night of my would-be prom, I felt robbed of my rightful coming-of-age."},{"type":"image","value":"{\"alt\":\"Photo of Kate Green.\",\"url\":\"https://assets3.dailybruin.com/images/prime.together-alone/NEWCA36CDEA-C274-4634-A254-73727DBE5D8D (1)-399601aa469cc286534c0059ae06ced4.jpg\",\"credit\":\"Ariana Fadel\",\"caption\":\"\"}"},{"type":"text","value":"The pandemic stretched on past my canceled prom and past my canceled high school graduation. Like the rest of the world, isolation set in as my social life dissipated. Lockdown eventually stretched even further, past my canceled college move-in day."},{"type":"text","value":"During the first week of September, I found myself standing in an empty Westwood apartment among scattered bankers boxes and piles of disassembled Ikea furniture. But I wasn’t moving into my first college apartment; instead, I was moving Emma out of her last one. I was excited to reunite with her, yet I could not shake the looming sense of loss as I dutifully packed the car. The college I worked so hard to matriculate at was tantalizingly close to where I stood sweltering in the Westwood heat. Each minute of carrying boxes added insult to the injury of not being able to take my turn attending Emma and my mother’s alma mater."},{"type":"text","value":"I sulked in the backseat as our SUV stuttered through Los Angeles traffic, and I mentally added my college experience to my ever-growing list of losses during 2020. Though I knew many people’s struggles were far more serious than my dejection over freshman year via Zoom, I wallowed in the unfairness of my goals unraveling. I felt as if I had lost my tenuous grasp on the future I envisioned for myself."},{"type":"text","value":"When four months later I sat in bed on New Year’s Eve, grainy black and white photographs of my grandfather sprawled before me on the duvet, I was crushed by the realization of the unimportance of my previous losses."},{"type":"text","value":"…"},{"type":"text","value":"That September trip to Los Angeles marked the last time I saw my grandfather. After moving Emma out of her apartment, my family cautiously paid a quick visit to my grandparents’ home 30 minutes away in Gardena, California."},{"type":"image","value":"{\"alt\":\"Photo of Kate Green.\",\"url\":\"https://assets3.dailybruin.com/images/prime.together-alone/NEWIMG_2843_edited-a783b1bfc514f02a8dfbb010215550e1.jpg\",\"credit\":\"Ariana Fadel\",\"caption\":\"\"}"},{"type":"text","value":"Social distancing marred our interactions as I hovered six feet away from where my grandfather sat in the kitchen. I wondered if his dementia and my mask made me unrecognizable, and I spent a regrettable amount of time staring at the family photos in the living room rather than risk talking with him and finding out the answer. Despite the awkwardness and the palpable anxiety our family shared, there was a comforting familiarity simply in seeing him in person. As long as I knew him, my grandfather always had this soothing effect. His gentle personality and generosity drew everyone in the family together, usually in the kitchen."},{"type":"pull","value":"{\"caption\":\"Solitude is not an ideal commonality, yet I savored the sense that this thread of shared experience connected me to my grandfather.”\"}"},{"type":"text","value":"When I visited Gardena as a little girl, I always looked forward to breakfasts with him. I would rise with my sister from our shared bed in my mother’s old room and toddle to the kitchen where he toiled over breakfast for us. I was a picky eater, so he would make special, mini squares of buttered toast just for me. He also had a knack for picking the ripest fruit, and I would watch him, fascinated, as he masterfully sliced up oranges and melons. We would share these snacks on paper plates during the long summer mornings as he played UCLA basketball games on the TV."},{"type":"text","value":"Since his passing, the most frequent stories told by family members are how he would similarly spoil everyone else in the family with culinary signs of his love. My relatives reminisce over how decades ago he would hide candy in his pockets so my mom and uncle could search for the sweets when he arrived home from work. My mother also recalls how he introduced my father to different types of Japanese food when my parents were in law school and found immense glee in preparing feasts for my dad’s starving-student appetite."},{"type":"text","value":"When my aunt in Los Angeles called to share the news of his death, she told my mother about taking him to the hospital for the last time. He was disoriented and unclear on where he was being taken, and why he could no longer stay at home. Despite the fogginess, he handed her an envelope of money and said, “Take everyone out to dinner when all of this is over.”"},{"type":"text","value":"…"},{"type":"text","value":"My mother and my aunts allege that his disposition mellowed with age — that before he was the quiet, doting grandfather I knew, he had a firecracker personality. I was intrigued to learn more about the dimensions of him I never got to meet, so I spent the January weeks after his passing poring through the papers I unearthed from my garage. The opportunity to revisit joyful anecdotes was a welcome distraction from my speculations regarding his final days in December."},{"type":"pull","value":"{\"caption\":\"The idea that his final days would be marked by loneliness, away from his familiar home and loved ones, felt unacceptable to us.”\"}"},{"type":"text","value":"The most insightful document I found was “The Biography of Shigeo Kawamura,” which my maternal grandmother wrote as a record of her husband’s life. The short book details the turbulence of his 95-year journey as a nisei – second-generation Japanese American – with vivid descriptions of military service as a G.I. in Germany and the various jobs he worked to support his four children. Stories of him mischievously selling cigarettes to fellow soldiers and playing music for my grandmother’s social club in the 1950s betrayed flickers of his rumored feistiness and made me smile through my grieving."},{"type":"image","value":"{\"alt\":\"Photos of Green’s grandfather.\",\"url\":\"https://assets3.dailybruin.com/images/prime.together-alone/NEWkate grandfather-3c3d76597201ef0a8e5fdd8c3030b380.jpg\",\"credit\":\"Photos courtesy of Kate Green\",\"caption\":\"\"}"},{"type":"text","value":"I voraciously ate up my grandmother’s words while sheltering in place in San Francisco – the world outside my window still embroiled in the surging pandemic. It was 10 months in, and my reading added value to the days of stifling isolation from all but my closest family."},{"type":"text","value":"Her stories also distracted me from the barrage of headlines regarding Los Angeles’ status as a roaring epicenter of the virus and the tragic nationwide milestone of 400,000 deaths from COVID-19. I could not stand to keep up with the news; pandemic statistics felt more painfully vivid having lost a loved one of my own so recently. There was constantly the reminder that because of the pandemic, people like my grandfather were passing away all alone, separated from their families when they needed them most. It was overwhelming to think of how each death across the country corresponded to its own biographies and pictures in someone else’s garage."},{"type":"text","value":"Scanning through the text, my eyes settled on a passage about my grandfather’s years at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center during World War II. The camp was one of the locations where Japanese Americans were interned via executive order during the war. My pandemic experience was once more knocked into perspective. He turned 18, my age, during his internment at Heart Mountain before being drafted into the Army. The losses he incurred of his family’s business and home, as well as his mobility and rights as an American citizen, dwarfed my losses of prom and a UCLA dorm to an absurd extent. I read about how he and his friends worked for months in the fields of a sugar beet farm outside the camp."},{"type":"text","value":"“At the end of their contract, after their back-breaking labor, the farmer refused to pay them,” my grandmother wrote."},{"type":"text","value":"The struggles of isolation in the comfort of my Wi-Fi-equipped San Francisco home became instantaneously less daunting when compared to the horrible experiences he endured while confined on an arid Wyoming field. I was struck by how 77 years ago, he likely felt the type of loss and isolation his death was now unveiling to me."},{"type":"pull","value":"{\"caption\":\"As long as I knew him, my grandfather always had this soothing effect. His gentle personality and generosity drew everyone in the family together.”\"}"},{"type":"text","value":"Solitude is not an ideal commonality, yet I savored the sense that this thread of shared experience connected me to my grandfather. I staved off the worst pangs of isolation and futile regret over our December separation by clinging to the feeling that lockdown was helping me relate to him like never before. As I spent the gray early-January days splitting my time between Zoom classes and talking to my grandma on the phone, dozens of questions about the shared circumstances between my grandfather and I bloomed in my brain. I fervently wanted to ask my grandfather: What was it like emerging from your time of isolation? How did you manage to adjust back into normal life, as if your young adulthood was not stolen? Will I be as resilient as you?"},{"type":"image","value":"{\"alt\":\"Photo of Kate Green.\",\"url\":\"https://assets3.dailybruin.com/images/prime.together-alone/NEW46318880-592B-42D3-8018-EE60DFDFA802-62a466ab9d70a6ce9755ebf896f63060.jpg\",\"credit\":\"Ariana Fadel\",\"caption\":\"\"}"},{"type":"text","value":"I pondered my grandfather’s 95-year life, punctuated by historical bouts of loneliness – the unfairness of it all. My imagination flitted between oxygen tanks, black and white images of barbed wire and the Interstate 5 highway which carried me to him each Christmas for 17 years. The curiosity, which grew out of grief, hardened into anger before waning back into longing."},{"type":"text","value":"I wished I could drive myself down to Los Angeles, where I ought to have been all along, and go to his old house in Gardena. Not the 2021 house, where my aunt and grandmother were discussing urn engravings, but the house of years prior. I would walk through the kitchen where he doted on me and the living room where he watched every UCLA basketball game, and I would sit and talk to him in the back sunroom he had built. I’d ask my questions without wearing a mask. He’d respond with fluid sentences not stilted by memory loss. Before I left, I would tell him that reading the stories of his youth was carrying me through my own time of isolation."}]}},"pageContext":{"term":"spring21","slug":"prime.together-alone"}},"staticQueryHashes":[]}