The Country Only Those Who Know, Know
“ 숨: Breath | Breathe
한 사람이 살다 갔다는 ‘마땅한 소식’을 전하고 나면, 남은 이들은 아는 사람만 아는 나라로 들어선다.”
Life12. The After, Mixed Media on Paper, 54x76.5cm
<아는 사람만 아는 나라> 링크 → 한겨레 서울앤
Once you have delivered the "fitting news" — that someone has lived and then passed on — the ones left behind step into a country known only to those who have already entered it. I am astounded as to how I have reached my age only to finally understand this last year. It was on the Olympic-daero in Seoul, the expressway I had driven countless times to visit my mother.
On the stretch of Olympic-daero where the road splits toward Noryangjin and Yeouido, there are guide lines in green and pink. Whenever I pass there, I am reminded of Monet's garden in Giverny, where those same colors seem to spread to touch every corner. It was my runaway trip, stolen from caregiving — yet as I walked through the garden, I found myself thinking only of my mother, who every spring somehow always knew exactly where the flowers were in blossom, and followed them. It was on that same road that the call came from the hospice ward at St. Mary's Hospital. It was the beginning of our hospice life.
The two months spent moving back and forth between home and hospital room bore a weight no lighter than the entire preceding decade of lung cancer treatment. Working alongside the hospice palliative care team, I came to realize that every moment of breathed living is "life."
It was a time in which I came to know my mother as a person in her own right,and to understand that a human being can still even bloom as fade. It was alsoa period of carrying out the work of gazing the progression toward death and holding back tears.
Although the medical team had warned us that a terminal patient's health fallsaway in steps, like a staircase, each drop left us bewildered. As in the old sijo Tanroga — where even holding thorns in one hand cannot keep age at bay¹ —death dragged my mother toward itself with faithful persistence, little by little, and then suddenly at a terrifying speed. Our efforts became meaningless too easily, at every stage. No matter how desperately we scrambled to stay one step ahead, we were beaten, every single time.
Even so, what allowed us to endure the frustration of repeated defeat was the hospice team surrounding and supporting our family. Medical staff, social workers, nursing staff, volunteers: they coached and steadied us, and because of them we could reach for the next step knowing it would be obsolete almost the moment we arrived there. At some point, I suppose I began to understand that death is not all fear. Looking back, what we experienced was warm — even close to welcoming. And yet: however guided by those kind hands, the country I had entered was not a gentle one.
Perhaps that is why, this year, an unnamed painter I once met in Samcheong-dong keeps coming to my mind.
It was a bright day. I was walking without direction when a gallery employee, standing beside wide white glass windows thrown fully open, called me in. Ientered and found an exhibition of works by families of the Sewol ferry victims. After moving through pieces carrying emotions I could hardly begin to imagine, I was about to leave when a large painting, briefly seen on entry, caught my eye. The employee asked whether I would like to hear the artist's explanation. Before I could answer, a smiling woman was already standing in front of me.
I was caught there, listening to her speak of two boys smiling brightly at the center of a schoolyard scene. One was her son, the other his friend. Wanting only to get out of there, I could not follow her words about painting techniques —my attention kept returning, helplessly, to a single leg in the corner of the painting.
"It would probably have been better to leave this out for the composition —why did you paint it with such care?"
It was then, I think, that her voice grew wet.
She said she had intended to omit it, but could not bring herself to do so when she thought about how this child had been there as well. And that leg, she said, was where she had spent the most time of all.
She spoke with such a calm face. I had not wanted her to see me — but the woman from the gallery had already appeared at my side and was pressing a box of tissues into my hand.
Pale spring green. Yellow forsythia. Long-blooming deep pink azaleas. And magnolias that drop their soft petals at their very brightest peak.
Maybe it is spring that does this to me.
Along with thoughts of my mother, I keep feeling apologetic about the tears I shed that day. Only now do I finally see a fragment of the landscape of that country.
And I think of her spring, too — of the way she went on explaining, steady, as though it were she who was offering the comfort.
