‘Do You Have a Family?’: Midlife With No Kids, Ageing Parents–and No Crisis

In this piece, E. Tammy Kim navigates her encroaching middle age while dealing with anxieties over her aging parents. Childless herself, Kim also reflects on non-traditional life paths amidst shifting cultural norms. Worrying about aging may not be a new topic, but by weaving in three generations, along with different cultures, Kim manages to take her thinking to a deeper level.

It was more depressing at my grandfather’s mound, set deep in a public cemetery, wild with weeds and thorns, an hour away. The diggers there were brusque, their diction was vulgar. They tossed bone fragments into the box, making an unnerving plonk. I wanted to remind them that someone once wore those bones. I thought of Shakespeare’s gravedigger: “But age with his stealing steps / Hath clawed me in his clutch, / And hath shipped me into the land, / As if I had never been such.”

We loaded the small boxes into a hired hearse — my uncle had made all the right arrangements — and drove in a caravan to a busy crematorium outside Seoul. The facility was half automated and totally impersonal. There were dozens of families like ours, wearing black or traditional white, going from one customer service counter to another, dabbing their eyes. I wondered if any of them were carrying bones older than ours, older than a hundred years.