“Turn off the lights around one a.m.,” she said. “He won’t like it, but it’s good for him to try to get some sleep as well.”
Then she lay on the cot I had pulled out, and pulling up the thin blanket at the foot of it, fell asleep immediately, under the glare of the fluorescent light.
I was grateful for the time alone with my father, and I thought how strange it was to be already used to his not being able to speak. It felt simple enough, familiar almost, to be sitting next to him, rubbing his legs and arms.
After one a.m., when the lights in the hallway were dimmed, the shadows around us pressed in and grew longer, and I could barely see the outlines of things. I could understand why my father did not like the lights to go out. As I sat rubbing his legs, the sound of weeping filled the hallway from the other rooms. Gathering strength, the sound seemed to enter our room and press in from all directions. It wasn’t spooky, though; it was too urgent for that. I tried not to listen. I tried to distract my father.
“I might have messed up my thesis,” I whispered, kneading my father’s feet and legs. “I really wanted to finish,” I said. “For you.”
My father put his hand on my arm and rubbed it while I rubbed his leg. It made me feel better.
“I haven’t given up,” I said. “I’m going to try.”
I thought he smiled. My heart rose. Sitting there in the dark, rubbing his legs, I realized that we had come to Korea not only to save him, but failing that, to make his death somehow beautiful. We had wanted all the visitors, the green mountains, and the hot, white sun—to sit here beside him and face the painful, vibrant beauty of his ravaged body. Perhaps in some way I had always been waiting for the gift of this fierce and desperate love.
In the days that followed, I finished reading The Little Prince. I started over from the beginning. The doctor came in and announced the time had passed to drain my father’s swollen stomach. My father was sprouting tubes everywhere, a tube to drain his pee, the tube that fed the thing that looked like wood glue into his body, a tube that pumped in something that looked like water. His body, which had been so light when I first arrived, got heavier and heavier, swelling up, weighed down by whatever was going in, and refusing to come out.
“Pee,” we told him every day. “Poop! It’s good for you.” But he hardly ever did.
My family slept so little that it was hard to keep track of the time. Visitors continued to come. I was humbled by how patient they were, how willing they were to sit and smile, and how most of them did not look away from my father when he grimaced in pain, but leaned forward and took his hand.
My uncle came to see us every day, bearing food packed in little glass containers from my grandmother for us to eat. He exchanged these for the empty containers from the previous day, for my grandmother to wash and fill again. She made soup for us, and lunch boxes, and for my father she made drinks that might give him strength and packed them in little thermoses, though they tasted so bad my father frowned and would not open his mouth after the first draft.
Each day my uncle passed on anxious messages from my grandmother. She wanted to visit, but each day my mother sent back the same message: do not come. She told my uncle that my father would be better soon, and that my grandmother could come then. I wondered what my uncle actually told my grandmother when he returned home to her: if he repeated what my mother said, or if he told her what he saw for himself.
For the most part, we didn’t talk to each other, my mother, Hannah, or I. We hovered around my father like anxious moths: we fluttered past each other, and spoke only to work out schedules and meals. We set everything aside except for him.
One bright day we took him outside in a wheelchair, and he blinked, pale in the sun, watching the butterflies in the garden. He looked transparent in the daylight. It frightened me, and at the same time, it was beautiful to see, so much light it hurt to look, and all the blankets we’d packed around him the only solid thing.
My aunt visited twice a week. She came alone, and fluctuated between talking in a loud and hearty voice and suddenly breaking down in tears. She wept right in front of him, while he stared. If she cried too long, he blinked and turned his head away. His cousin came more often, always reminding us that he and my father had been like brothers. If my aunt was also in the room when he visited, she stiffened and seemed just about to contradict him, but then she would clamp down her lips tight over her teeth and shake her head a little to herself—enough so the rest of us noticed, but subtle enough that we wouldn’t be encouraged to ask what was wrong.
It was as if the two of them, Komo and Big Cousin, were competing for my father’s attention. As if we all were. I wished he could enjoy it. Growing up, he’d always been the younger one, the one who wanted approval from them. His illness had reversed that.
Even with us, my father, who had felt overlooked in his household of women, was suddenly the focus of everything. Hannah and I had left school behind, had left America, our lives. And my mother had left her home, her friends, her job—it was not her first time following my father where he needed to go. I found myself growing resentful when my aunt monopolized the chair next to his bed, or when Hannah whispered something in his ear that made him laugh his painful laugh.
I prickled most when my aunt sat murmuring to my father of their childhood. She told him stories from when they were very young. It was as if she was trying to exclude us by taking him back to a time before we existed.
“There is still time,” she said to my mother one day. “Call a minister. There is still hope for him. God works miracles.”
“He doesn’t want it,” my mother said calmly. “I asked him already. He said”—and here my mother’s voice twisted a little with pride—“he said he doesn’t wish to go to heaven if I won’t be there. He’d prefer to be with me wherever I am.”
“What?” My aunt turned to my father. “How could he dare say such a thing?” She turned back to us, and threw herself down on her knees. “I am begging you,” she cried, on the floor. “I am on my knees.”
I stared at her. Was she serious?
Hannah stepped back. “Jesus Christ,” she said.
From the ground, my aunt cried, “I knew it would be like this when he married you. God is punishing him for turning his back. Now, God is turning his back.”
Unexpectedly, Hannah laughed. My aunt looked up at her, startled out of her tears. Hannah drew herself up and said in a low voice, “And yet there is no hiding place in the wide world where troubles may not find you, and there has never lived a man who was able to say more than you can say, that you do not know when sorrow will visit your house.” She pointed at my aunt. “So be sincere with yourself, fix your eyes upon Job; even though he terrifies you, it is not this he wishes, if you yourself do not wish it.”
There was a moment of silence. I half-gasped, half-laughed, but my aunt was scrambling up, her face red—from her tears or outrage, I could not tell. Before she could speak, my mother stepped forward, placing herself between my aunt and Hannah. “Hang on,” she said, holding out her hand to my red-faced aunt. She turned to Hannah. “What was that?” she asked, a smile working on her face.
“Kierkegaard,” Hannah said.
“How dare you,” my aunt said, advancing.
This was a circus, I thought.
And then my mother turned to my aunt. She gave her a soothing look, and touched her arm. “I was just thinking it would be nice if you sang to him,” she said.
Every day since my father had come to the hospital, my aunt had wanted to sing the songs their mother used to sing to him. Christian songs. Religious songs. And every day my father had glanced at my mother and nervously shaken his head.
We were all taken aback by my mother’s offer, and sensing this was a concession not to come again, my aunt abandoned Hannah and took her place by my father’s side. My father gazed blankly up at her. She put her hands on the rails of his bed and took a breath.
She began to sing in a low, quiet voice. The hymn she h
ad chosen was beautiful and solemn, and though I resented her for trying, even now, to impose her past upon him, to wedge it between him and us, as she sang I saw how much she loved him, and how she had been beautiful to him, when they were the only two people who cared for each other in the world.
Her voice trembled. It was a sad, lonely song she chose to sing, the song of an old woman, and as I listened I realized she was older than their mother or father had ever lived to be. Then, as she was singing, my father spoke. He spoke. And then he tried to speak again, for the first time in weeks, and what he said was, “Wife,” looking past my aunt’s shoulder, reaching out one hand, “Wife.”
My mother went to him instantly, sidling around my aunt, who did not move aside. My father took my mother’s hand and started to laugh.
“Did you like my song?” my aunt said, excitedly. She looked at my mother, and Hannah, at me. “It was my song that got him to speak, isn’t that so?”
But my father wasn’t looking at her. He held my mother’s hands and said, “Don’t let go.”
“I won’t,” my mother said. “I’m here.”
My father was laughing: it was so out of place, a thread of giddy laughter as if it had been stopped up all these weeks and was bubbling out of him. I had never heard him laugh quite like this before, and his voice was thin and rough, but he said laughing, again and again, “Don’t let go,” and my mother, infected, surprised, began to laugh, too, and said that she would not, she never would.
We were thrilled. We were even kind to my aunt. “Maybe it was the singing,” we said. That morning was filled with joy.
When the doctor came we were practically dancing. We crowded around him. “He’s talking again,” we said.
“Yes,” the doctor said.
“Isn’t it good news?” we asked, and the doctor looked at us in surprise.
“It doesn’t change anything,” he replied. He looked at the chart in his hand. He looked at my father. He stuck out his hand, in front of my father’s face. He waved it. “Grab my hand,” he ordered.
My father smiled at us, but didn’t seem to hear the doctor.
“But he talked,” my aunt said. “Isn’t that an improvement?”
“He’s losing his mental faculties. It’s a chemical thing. I’ve explained it already,” he said.
Stricken, my aunt walked to a corner of the room and began to weep quietly. Hannah watched her with faint disgust, then leaned over my father’s bed and put her hand gently in front of my father. “Shake,” Hannah whispered into my father’s ear. My father looked at her, and seemed to focus. He grabbed her hand. Hannah looked at the doctor triumphantly, but he shook his head.
“Sorry, but no,” he said.
My mother stepped forward. “You,” she said. She sounded impatient, irritated. It was a voice she used on me when I’d done something stupid. It was a voice she used on someone who had something to learn. “Who among us here won’t die?” she asked. She pointed at him, and he flinched. “You?”
The doctor shut his folder filled with all those papers, records, and measurements. “There is nothing more I can do,” he said.
“You have made that clear,” my mother said. “But listen well: all of us are dying. And you are, too. You will die one day. You can be sure of that. So for now, right here, you can make him comfortable. You can be kind.” Her voice rose. “There is no reason to be proud that there is nothing you can do for him. It does not put you above us. One day you will be here, too.”
I was aghast. But my father watched all this, and then he opened his mouth, and laughed.
22.
A few weeks later, nothing had changed. Each day the doctor said the end was approaching. Each day my father persisted. I told my mother that it was time for us to take my father out of the hospital. He had always said he didn’t want to die in a hospital, and I thought moving him was one last thing we could do for him, the one thing that might give him hope.
“We need to take him somewhere else,” I said.
My mother looked up at me from her place on the cot as if something had lifted from her shoulders, as if she had been waiting for this moment. She nodded.
“Let’s take him to his family home,” I said.
“How?” my mother asked. “The ride is too long.” She had grown vague in the last few days in a way that frightened me.
“We can figure something out,” Hannah said. “I think we should go, too.”
So when my father’s cousin came to visit later in the afternoon, I said, “We want to move him.”
“But they can take better care of him here,” Big Cousin said.
I looked around the small room, with the caged bed and the antiseptic smell. The light was always the same; the sounds were always the same. I couldn’t bear for him to be here another week. There was no beauty here.
“He wanted to go to his family home,” I said.
Big Cousin glanced down at my father, who was sleeping, for once.
I paused. “He said you were like brothers.”
Big Cousin looked at me. “Really?” He looked at my father, yellowing against the crisp white sheets, the remaining tufts of hair so fine on his head. “Did he really say that?”
I nodded.
He sighed then, as if a burden had been lifted. “Well, I’ll arrange it,” he said. He started making plans. He said he’d get his other cousins to go and get the house ready. He’d rent a van and arrange for my father to be moved.
My mother thanked and thanked him.
He shrugged. “We grew up together,” he said.
He waited a while until my father woke. Then he was by his side, ready to tell him the news. My father smiled as he always did to see his cousin, and nodded, but did not seem to really understand.
“Home,” his cousin said. “We’re taking you home!” When my father smiled vaguely, he continued. “And I want you to know that it will be all right for you to be buried there as well,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to tell you that.”
My father frowned.
“Not now,” I said from my corner. “Don’t talk about that now.”
“Your father asked me himself for this favor.” Big Cousin sounded injured. “When he first arrived. I wanted to put his mind at ease.”
“Oh,” I said. When I first arrived, my father had told me he wanted to be cremated and taken to America, not buried. Now I understood: my father had always wanted to be buried in their family plot, but it had taken this long for his cousin to respond to his request. My father had told us he wanted to be cremated so that we wouldn’t worry if that’s what ended up happening. He hadn’t wanted us to know he’d asked for this favor, for us to blame his cousin if he didn’t come through.
“Did you hear me?” Big Cousin said, talking loudly into my father’s face. “I will do this for you.”
My father did not try to respond either way. Instead, he looked unhappy and frightened.
That night it was my turn to stay up with my father. I was exhausted, but he was anxious, and did not want me to fall asleep. He shifted in his bed and made soft noises, waving a hand in front of my face whenever I started to doze.
After a few hours of this, I leaned forward over the rail of the bed and took my father’s hand. “Daddy,” I said. I thought of him asking his cousin months ago if he could be buried near his childhood home. Why had he never hinted of such things to me? “You have to live,” I said. I could not stand the look on his face when his cousin mentioned the burial site, or the thought that he was discouraged.
My father blinked. “Why?” he asked.
The question hurt me. I squeezed his hand. “I haven’t had children yet,” I said. He had wanted me to have children by now. “You have to teach them math. How else will they learn it properly?”
My father smiled but did not answer. He squeezed my hand, and looked away.
I didn’t know how to say what I really meant: that imagining his death felt like a betrayal. That I would have given him m
y lungs, my liver, my stomach. I would have given him back everything he’d given me. He couldn’t die yet. I hadn’t done anything to make him proud.
We both drifted off for a while, but he woke a couple of hours later, and called for me. When I leaned forward, he said, “The ground will be hard.”
I turned on the lamp by his bed. “What are you talking about?”
In the dim lamplight, my father’s eyes were large and liquid, devouring the room. “We buried her too shallow,” he said. “She wasn’t deep enough.”
Damn his cousin, I thought, for mentioning the grave.
“I told you it was too shallow,” my father said.
My throat clamped up. “It’s all right,” I said. I swallowed. I took his hands in mine and rubbed them. They were so dry, like they could flake away between my own. I took some lotion and began to work it into his skin.
“When the floods came,” he said, “I worried.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about, and in some ways, didn’t care. The important thing now was to soothe him. “But it was fine,” I said.
“No, no,” he said. “Sometimes I saw her,” he said, “floating down the stream.”
I wanted to wake my mother. Was this hallucination or memory? “That’s just a dream,” I said. “She’s fine. She’s where you left her.”
“Why?” he asked. “Why did she die?”
“Who?” Who could he possibly be talking about?
“I don’t know,” my father said. His voice was high and panicky. “Why did she die?”
He was gripping my hands.
“It’s okay,” I said. I tried to sound like my mother: calm, reassuring. “She’s all right, Daddy,” I said. “I promise. It’s all right.” I patted his hand. “Should we chant the Buddha’s name?” I asked. “Would you like me to do that?”
My father nodded.
And so I began, keeping my voice low and calm. I was soo-thed by the sound, by the feel of my own voice coming quiet and steady out of my body. Had this been what my mother’s voice had sounded like when I was young and sick, and she laid her hands on me and prayed? I chanted for what felt like a long time. I was tired, and it was dark, and I did not want to wake anyone else. I wanted to sleep, like this, to fall asleep chanting with my hand clasped in my father’s.
Forgotten Country Page 22