To Have and to Hate

My Grandparents and Seven Rotten Decades of Marriage

My grandfather, age 94, is in the hospital for a hip replacement. My grandmother, age 87, hasn’t visited him once. It’s been almost two weeks now.

Many of us dream of finding someone to grow old with. Not many of us dream of growing old with someone we hate. But my grandmother has hated my grandfather for 69 years–and counting. Theirs was a relationship forged under circumstances entirely foreign to most of us today.

My grandfather, Young Choi, was born in 1917, during World War I. By the age of four, he …