Grief and K-Pop
When my pap died, I was having trouble realizing it. Not that I didn’t understand what death was, just that I couldn’t believe I was never gonna hear him say my name again or walk into the living room and see him sitting in his favorite leather chair watching a black and white Western. It wasn’t that his death came as a surprise either. For the last few years of his life, I felt like I was watching him slowly die. He couldn’t come to my tennis matches anymore. He couldn’t go out and get us OIP pizza “just because.” He couldn’t even stand up straight.
So, in a way, I guess I was relieved when my mom called me, sobbing in the hallway of a hospital, fogging up her PPE.
He was no longer suffering. He was no longer riddled with guilt for not being able to attend his grandchildren’s events. He was at peace, content, wherever people’s souls go. But that left me, selfishly, alone here on Earth, trying to imagine my life without him: his phone calls, his little chuckle, him rolling his eyes when my nana would scold him for eating too many sweets.
I cried about it. A lot. I went to the viewing, the funeral, and then I had to go back to my first semester at college and pretend everything was fine and my world hadn’t been completely altered. It was a true test of my endurance. One of the hardest I’ve ever faced. I trudged along to classes. I didn’t smile with my friends, and none of my writing assignments excited me.
My pap loved music. He had been singing to his grandchildren since we were little, pudgy babies falling asleep in his warm arms. He loved songs like “Amazing Grace” and “Sweet Caroline” by Neil Diamond. My mom told me he would always sing in the car as he sped along the highway when she was growing up. Songs are how we continue to remember him, so it makes sense that songs were able to pull me out of the grief-stricken fog my world had become.
I had been obsessively watching—and then rewatching—a Netflix original television show called—you’ve probably heard of it by now—Squid Game around the time my pap passed. Given how much I enjoyed a story told entirely in Korean, I felt a desire to delve further into Korean culture. It also took my mind off of everything going on.
I remembered from my eleventh-grade Spanish class that one of the best ways to familiarize yourself with someone else’s culture is to listen to their music. “Music speaks the language of the soul, penetrating into the past and resonating into the future, unearthing pain and tenderness and sorrow and joy, reminding us of our infinite fragility and extraordinary strength, reigniting our dreams and passions once again to remind us of who we are meant to be,” as L.R. Knost put it. Music was also the thing driving my pap’s passion and dreams. He couldn’t do all of the things he had wanted to do growing up. Instead, he’d joined the military, met my nana, and had eight children. They didn’t have a lot of money, so he had to work two jobs to support them. He worked as a guidance counselor at a local elementary school and then nights at a prison teaching the inmates. He had a short break in between where he would put whoever the baby was at the time to sleep by singing to them. Even when she outgrew being put to bed, my mom told me she would still listen to him sing from upstairs. Music was always an escape, a release, and a way to connect to his children. I wanted music to work like that for me too.
So I opened up my Spotify app and played the first K-Pop playlist that popped up—K-Pop was the only music I knew Korea was famous for making, thanks to my best friend and notable K-Pop enthusiast, Trista. The first thing I remember about their music was that most of the choruses were in English. I furiously texted Trista, expressing my shock. “THERE’S ENGLISH IN THIS!” I wrote on Snapchat. She just laughed as if that was the most obvious fact in the world and I was the last person on Earth to find out. I giggled at her response, and a tiny little weight lifted off my shoulders.
Letting my surprise fuel my continuous exploration of the genre, I stumbled across a song entitled “On” by—you guessed it—BTS. Bulletproof Boys—nicknamed BTS—is probably one of the most famous K-Pop groups in existence. I’d heard of them of course but never really got into them the way I normally get obsessed with things. During “On,” there is a part where a member of the vocal line, Jungkook, sings a beautiful bridge that highlights his amazing vocals. He sings in a way that is loud but also soft, exciting but also calming. I was immediately entranced. I wanted to know everything about this boy with the beautiful voice.
That is exactly what I did with BTS. After finding Jungkook, I met them all. I listened to every song and music video I could get my hands on. I saved pictures of him off my Pinterest under one of the greatest sections of Pinterest ever created: the “boyfriend material” tag. If I wasn’t obsessed before, I was certainly obsessed now. It consumed my thoughts, but most importantly, it eased my heart. It was like I had finally found a place to put all of my love for my pap. He probably would’ve loved listening to this new group with me, maybe he would’ve even sung along to one of their songs.
In my pursuit of all the information about BTS in existence, I discovered one of my favorite parts of the entire K-Pop industry: content. They film content all the time! It was great for new fans like me who were trying to learn their names and for long-standing fans who loved the boys and their antics. The videos I watched the most—and still do to this day—were the fan-made compilation videos of the group’s content on YouTube. With titles like “Jungkook and his god-tier personality” and “Jin being so done with BTS & scolding them for 14 minutes straight,” suddenly, I was laughing again. My laugh wasn’t the same—there was definitely an underlying layer of pain in it, but I had BTS there to be happy when I could not, and at the very least, make me smile in a way I hadn’t for a long time.
Certainly, their silly antics weren’t the only thing that kept me enamored with them. It was also their lyrics and, most importantly, their message. “If you want to love others, I think you should love yourself first,” from RM, “Your presence can give happiness. I hope you remember that,” from Jin, and “I hope you will never give up. Remember there is a person here in Korea, in the city of Seoul, who understands you,” from Jimin… to quote a few. These were things I needed to hear. My pap loved me so much, and he would have wanted me to continue living my life, to continue enjoying it the way I was starting to enjoy it by liking these boys.
There’s a comfort in sadness. As long as I remained sad, the memory of my pap could live on. But that’s no way to live. I needed to find a way to love him while also being happy and smiling again. BTS was able to do that for me, to hold my hand as I walked a path meant for two.
Sydney Kyle is a junior at Commonwealth University-Bloomsburg in Bloomsburg, PA, pursuing a degree in English with a concentration in Creative Writing and a minor in Emergent Media. Her work has appeared in Warren, her university’s literary and art journal, for three consecutive years. She has also received the Baillie Award for the Literary Essay from her university’s English department. In her free time, she collects photocards of the K-Pop idol Johnny Suh and attends K-Pop events with her best friend, Trista.
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