The Lantern of Grief

When my wife, Mei, moved from Seoul to the quiet shores of Oahu with her father and sister, it was a fresh start—a chance to leave behind the sorrow of her mother’s death and the tangled mess of her parents’ marriage. Her mother, Yoona, had been a beautiful, volatile woman who loved her daughters fiercely but carried a storm inside her. She died of cancer, not peacefully, but with a bitter anger that lingered in the air of their Seoul apartment like the smell of burnt incense. Mei’s father, Dong-hyun, had loved Yoona but had strayed, and Yoona had her own secrets. The daughters were the only pure thing in that household, shielded from the worst of the fights, but they felt the undercurrent of betrayal and regret.

After the move, our new home on the North Shore was a small, plantation-style house with creaking floors and a sprawling banyan tree in the backyard. We thought the island’s warmth would heal Mei’s wounds, but soon, strange things began to happen. At first, it was little: a flickering ceiling light, a television that turned on by itself, always tuning to static. Mei would find her phone battery drained even after a full charge. She’d wake in the middle of the night with the sense that someone was standing by the bed, but when she looked, no one was there.

Mei was not a dramatic person. She was a pragmatic ER nurse, grounded in science and logic. So when she started talking about seeing her mother in her peripheral vision—just a glimpse of a floral dress disappearing around a corner—she was dismissed as grief playing tricks on her mind. But then the dreams came. In the dreams, her mother would be standing in the middle of a field of crimson flowers, calling her name, but her voice was distorted, like a radio caught between stations. Mei would try to run to her, but the distance never closed, and her mother’s face would contort into an expression of pure fury.

One night, about a year after we moved, I woke to find Mei hovering above the bed, her body lifted a foot off the mattress, her face peaceful as she slept. She floated there for a moment, bathed in a warm, golden light that seemed to emanate from nowhere, and then gently descended. When I told her in the morning, she didn’t seem surprised. ‘She’s trying to tell me something,’ Mei said, her eyes distant. ‘But I think it’s a warning.’

Mei’s sister, Sun, had been staying with us for a few months, recovering from her own bout of depression. Sun was darker than Mei, more prone to anger and sporadic drinking. On the night of the floating incident, Sun burst into our room, her face pale. ‘I saw Auntie in the kitchen,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘She was hovering in a corner, and she pointed at me. She looked sad.’ We searched the house, but found nothing. The air in the kitchen felt cold, and a cup of coffee we had left on the counter had been moved.

A few weeks later, Sun attempted suicide. She had been clean for months, but she relapsed, and Mei found her in the bathtub with the lights off, water spilling over the edge, a razor on the tile. The strange thing was, Sun wasn’t coherent when she was found. She kept muttering about ‘the lantern’ and ‘the tree.’ After Sun was stabilized at the hospital, Mei and I went back to the house to gather some belongings. In the backyard, under the banyan tree, we discovered a small, rusty tin lantern, half-buried in the roots. It was old, with a glass pane that was cracked. When Mei picked it up, it flickered to life, a strange, bluish flame dancing inside, even though there was no oil or fuel.

That’s when Mei broke down and started talking about the past. She said that on the day her mother died, Yoona had gripped her hand and whispered, ‘I left you a gift under the tree in the new house.’ But they hadn’t moved then, and Mei had dismissed it as fevered rambling. Now, with the lantern in her hand, a cold dread settled over us. ‘She wanted us to find this,’ Mei said. ‘But I think it’s cursed.’

Sun’s condition worsened. She became erratic, talking to thin air, sometimes shrieking that ‘it’s not mother, it’s something else,’ and then falling silent for hours. The doctors were baffled. Meanwhile, the household electronics began to fail in bizarre, coordinated ways. All the clocks would stop at exactly 3:33 AM, then restart. The radio would play a screeching sound that resonated with the lantern’s flame, which would grow taller and turn a sickly orange. Mei started having nosebleeds and nightmares that left her screaming.

I decided to take the lantern to a local shaman, a woman named Aunty Leilani who lived in a remote valley. When she saw the lantern, she gasped. ‘This is not of this world,’ she said. ‘It is a vessel for a restless spirit, one that has been warped by anger and regret. The spirit is not the woman you knew; it has become something else after death, something that feeds on the pain of its loved ones.’ She told us that the lantern was a type of memento mori, a talisman that trapped a soul when its body died in a state of turmoil. The spirit could not pass on because it was bound to the object, and it would lash out, drawing energy from the living to sustain itself. ‘The two daughters are its food,’ she said. ‘You must sever the bond, or it will consume them completely.’

Mei, Sun, and I returned to the house with the shaman’s instructions. We had to burn the lantern at the base of the banyan tree, at the exact moment of the new moon, while chanting a specific chant in Korean. But as the night approached, Sun grew more violent. She claimed that her mother was telling her to kill herself in order to join her, to end the suffering. She began to carve strange symbols into her arms, and we had to tie her to the bed to keep her from harming herself. Mei, too, was deteriorating. She would sit beside Sun, whispering in Korean, her voice not entirely her own, saying things like ‘You failed me’ and ‘I should have aborted you.’

On the night of the new moon, a thick fog rolled in from the ocean, blanketing the yard. We dragged Sun, sedated, to the tree. The lantern sat on a root, its flame guttering. I held a torch, ready to ignite it. But as Mei began the chant, the lantern’s glass shattered, and a burst of cold wind knocked us backward. In the branches above, I saw a shape—a woman’s figure, entirely black, with eyes like burning coals. It let out a sound that was not a scream but a low, resonant drone that vibrated in our bones. Sun began to convulse, and Mei fell to her knees, clutching her head.

I realize now that the spirit wasn’t trying to harm us; it was trying to merge. It wanted to become one with the living, to experience life again through their bodies. As I watched, the dark figure descended upon Sun, and she stopped moving. The drone grew louder, and then, in a flash of light, it was gone. The lantern went dark, and the fog lifted. Sun lay still, breathing shallowly. Mei looked up, her face wet with tears. ‘She’s gone,’ she said. ‘But she left something behind.’

We took Sun to the hospital, and after a week, she woke up, disoriented but coherent. She remembered me and Mei, but she had no memory of the past weeks. The suicide attempt was a distant blur. The strange happenings ceased; the electronics worked; the dreams stopped. We buried the remains of the lantern under the tree, and Mei and Sun seemed to heal, slowly. But sometimes, late at night, I catch Mei staring at the banyan tree, a sad smile on her face. She says she has a vague feeling that her mother is finally at peace, but also that she misses her. ‘She left me a gift,’ Mei said once, ‘but it wasn’t the lantern. It was the knowledge that she loved us, even if she was broken.’ I’m not sure if that’s true, but I’ve never seen the lantern again. Yet sometimes, in the corner of my eye, I think I see a faint, blue glow under the tree. And I wonder if it’s actually gone, or if it’s just waiting for the next generation of grief.