Hotboxing my car as my grandma died

'In sleep, she perished slowly before me. My grandmother, now submerged amongst the weeds of dementia.'

Between December 2025 and April 2026, I spent most nights alone, hotboxing my car parked outside the house in stunned, tired silence. These are some of the high thoughts I recorded in my Notes app:

If I worked at Spotify, I would suggest a promo event where an artist has their discography on shuffle, and they perform whatever song that comes up live.

I’m putting my whole pussy into making sure I eat enough vegetables every day, sorting my paper and plastics so I don’t contribute to landfill, avoiding AI because it’s eroding our cognitive ability and media literacy. Fuck having kids.

High every few days: amazing, crack up, dope music, discover a new hobby. High every day: sad, binge, get fat, late for work.

On December 31st, I wrote:

Core memory unlocked. Starting the New Year squished between Grandma and the cat in bed. My best one yet.

When she snored, her lips rippled out like she was in a Looney Tunes cartoon—exaggerated, loud, so untroubled. I touched her forehead, and thought about the millions of nerve fibres undoing themselves. In sleep, she perished slowly before me. My grandmother, now submerged amongst the weeds of dementia.

She was my roommate and my best friend during the four years we lived together in Seoul. My mother and I had to fly back one last time to bring her to Auckland. Dying of dementia and pulmonary fibrosis, we brought her here with the understanding she would never return to Korea.

The first night, Grandma knew she was not where she was supposed to be. Between glaring at me and demanding to go back, then pleading with me to take her home, she sobbed in my lap as I stroked her hair and wiped her trickling tears. Finally, the Xanax that I said were vitamins smothered her senses and she was asleep.

She lived one hundred and forty four more nights.

On January 16th, another reason to not have kids:

Being responsible for feeding someone every few hours is hell. Do not recommend.

It’s the little things, like learning how to hide calories in teaspoons of rice. When you’re dying, you no longer wish to eat. When you don’t eat, you lose energy. Without energy, every single time your granddaughter lifts your body from the couch that you permanently occupy, the earth will violently hurl, and you will choke and sweat and cry out. All of this just to sit up and be able to take a piss. She refused to wear incontinence pads. I learned over and over that the second most important thing that came with being a carer was maintaining her dignity. I could never decide what the most important thing was, but dignity would always be the second. Because even as the architecture of her mind continued to crumble, she cared.

On February 9th, high as a kite:

I’m scared I’m only going to remember the sick parts of her. I can’t imagine the joyful, bitchy, resilient force of a woman she used to be, and was for most of her life, when I can only see this sunken skeleton who can’t walk or shit by herself. With no teeth, no hair, no mind.

Eventually, the only way she could breathe was through an oxygen tank. It took two people to steady her to the bathroom. Her own dad was long gone; the one giving her away was my mother, hand gripping trembling hand. Behind them, I unravelled the winding tubes that connected the tank to her nasal cannula like a clumsy trainbearer trailing a pale bride. She was so beautiful, it loosened something in all of us. Grandma heaved with pressurised oxygen and the compressor continued to swell and collapse with the force of a grand choir. Each journey between the couch and the bathroom took everything in her, and when she was done, I gave her liquid morphine from a syringe. In the kitchen, in the dark, I took swigs for good luck.

On March 25th, midnight passed and I turned thirty to the mechanical rise and fall of the oxygen compressor next to her head:

Thank you for spending this birthday with me, even though I wish you’d go now. I love you. I love you.

I stayed up through the night doing laundry (because when one is dying, one goes through so many towels). Then, delirious and exhausted, I sat outside on the concrete. It was becoming light enough for me to see a hedgehog putter past, and I wept.

When the end was near and we knew it, we called the minister. As the minister’s wife walked in, Grandma squeaked out and it was the last time I saw her face crumble with pleasure. Someone suggested the hymn “Nearer My God To Thee” like we were on the goddamn Titanic. She simply opened and closed her lips, mouthing vaguely to verses she had sung many Sundays throughout her life. My goldfish grandma. Her blank gaze made me think of a bloated fish, belly up in the dirty waters of a bowl.

On April 30th, I slept on the floor of her hospital room in my hoodie. Around four in the morning, my sister shook me. “Haro,” she whispered. “I think Grandma died.”

From her possessions, I took a plastic green comb, a sewing tin, her bible and playing cards. I kept the bible next to my bedside and tucked the others into my closet. On the first night I had lived in this world without her, I ripped a page out of Genesis and began to roll a clumsy, skinny joint.

Haro Lee’s first book, Watching Television in a Love Motel (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026) is out now. RRP NZ$30.