Please Look After Mom

by Kyung-Sook Shin

  “When Tamyang Aunt passed away a while ago, her husband was bathed in tears. He said that before Tamyang Aunt died she made him promise he wouldn’t get an expensive shroud for her. She told him that she had ironed her wedding hanbok and asked him to put that on her when he sent her off to the next world. She said she was sorry that she was going first, without even seeing their daughter get married, and that he shouldn’t spend money on her. Tamyang Uncle was leaning on me when he told me that, and he cried so much that my clothes got completely wet. He said that all he did was to make her work hard. That it was wrong of her to die, now that they were a bit more comfortable, and that she’d made him promise he wouldn’t buy her a nice outfit even at her death. I don’t want to do that. I want to go wearing nice clothes. Do you want to see them?”

  When you didn’t move, your wife sighed deeply again.

  “You should go before me. I think that’s for the best. They say that although there’s an order to when people come into this world, there isn’t one when you leave, but we should go in the order we came. Since you’re three years older than me, you should leave three years earlier. If you don’t like that, you can go three days earlier. I can just live here, and if I really can’t live by myself, I can go to Hyong-chol’s and be useful—peel garlic and clean—but what would you do? You don’t know how to do anything. Someone has waited on you all your life. I can just see it. Nobody likes a smelly, silent old man taking up space. We are now burdens to the children, who have no use for us. People say you can tell from the outside a house that has an old person living in it. They say it smells. A woman can somehow take care of herself and live, but a man becomes pathetic if he lives alone. Even if you want to live longer, at least don’t live longer than me. I’ll give you a good burial and follow you there—I can do that.”

  You climb on a chair to take down the box from the top of the wardrobe. Actually, there are two boxes. From its size, it looks like the box in front is yours and the one behind is your wife’s. They are much larger than they looked when you were lying down. She said that she hadn’t seen such beautiful fabric in her life, that she’d gone far to get it. You open the box, and there are hemp cloths, mourning clothes, wrapped in blindingly white cotton. You undo each knot. The hemp to cover the mattress, hemp to cover the blanket, hemp to wrap the feet, hemp to wrap the hands, all inside, in order. You said you’d bury me first and then go.… You blink and gaze at the pouches that would wrap around your and your wife’s fingers and toes after your deaths.

  Two girls run in through the side gate toward you, calling you, “Grandpa!” Tae-sop’s children, who live near the creek. They soon wander away from you, looking around the house. They must be looking for your wife. Tae-sop, who is running a Chinese restaurant in Taejon, left his two children with his elderly mother, who was so old she could barely take care of herself, and never showed his face. Perhaps he isn’t doing too well. Your wife always clucked her tongue when she saw the children, saying, “Even if Tae-sop is like that, what kind of person is Tae-sop’s wife to do this?” Neighbors whispered that Tae-sop’s wife and the restaurant’s cook had run away together. Your wife was the person who made sure the children ate, not their own grandmother. Once, your wife saw that they hadn’t eaten and brought them home to feed them breakfast; the next morning, the girls came over, sleep still in their eyes. Your wife placed two more spoons on the table and seated the girls; after that, they came by at each mealtime. Sometimes they would arrive before the food was ready and go lie on their stomachs and play, and when the table was set they would run over and sit down. They stuffed their mouths as if they would never see food again. You were flabbergasted, but your wife took their side, as if they were her secret granddaughters: “They must be so hungry to do that. It’s not like before, when things were difficult for us.… It’s nice to have them around, it’s not as lonely.”

  After the girls started to come for meals, your wife would, even in the morning, cook an eggplant dish and steam mackerel. When your children visited from Seoul with fruit or cake, she saved the treats until the girls poked their heads through the gate, around four in the afternoon. Soon enough, the girls started expecting snacks on top of three meals, and your wife also started to assume that she would feed them. You don’t know how she managed to feed the children when Pyong-sik, the owner of the store in town, had to bring her home because he found her sitting at the bus stop, not knowing which bus to take home. Or when she left to go to the garden to pick some adlay but was found sitting in the fields beyond the railroad by Ok-chol. What did the children eat during your absence? You didn’t think of the girls while you were in Seoul.

  “Where’s Grandma, Grandpa?” the elder child asks you, figuring out that your wife isn’t here only after she has looked by the well and in the shed and the back yard and even opened the doors to the bedrooms. It’s the elder who asks the question, but the younger girl comes right up next to you, waiting for your answer. You want to ask the same thing. Really, where is she? Is she even in this world? You tell the children to wait, and you scoop some rice from the rice jar and wash it and put it in the electric rice-cooker. The girls run around, opening every bedroom door. As if your wife might walk out of one of the rooms. You pause, not knowing how much water to pour in, because you’ve never done this before; then you add about half a cup more and press the switch down.

  That day, in the subway car leaving Seoul Station, how many minutes did it take you to grasp that your wife wasn’t there, in the moving subway car? You assumed that she had gotten on behind you. As the car stopped at Namyong Station and left it, you felt a sudden terror. Before you could examine the source of that feeling, something, despair that you had committed a grievous mistake that you couldn’t go back on, punched your soul. Your heart was beating so loudly that you could hear it. You were afraid to look behind you. The moment when you had to confirm that you’d left your wife in Seoul Station, that you’d boarded the train and traveled one stop away, the moment that you turned around, accidentally hitting the shoulder of the person next to you, you realized that your life had been irreparably damaged. It didn’t take even a minute to realize that your life had veered off track because of your speedy gait, because of your habit of always walking in front of your wife during all those years of marriage, first when you were young, then old, for fifty years. If you had turned around to check whether she was there right as you got on the car, would things have turned out this way? For years your wife used to make comments—your wife, who always lagged behind when you went somewhere together, would follow you with sweat beaded on her forehead, grumbling from behind—“I wish you’d go a little slower, I wish you’d go at my pace. What’s the rush?” If you finally stopped to wait for her, she would smile in embarrassment and say, “I walk too slowly, right?”

  She would tell you, “I’m sorry, but what would people say if they saw us? If they saw us, who live together, but one person is all the way up there and the other person is all the way back here, they would say, Those people must hate each other so much that they can’t even walk next to each other. It’s not good to appear that way to other people. I won’t try to hold your hand or anything, so let’s just go slower. What are you going to do if you lose sight of me?”

  She must have known what would happen. The thing your wife said to you most frequently, ever since you met her when you were twenty, was to walk more slowly. How could you have not gone slower, when your wife asked you to slow down your entire lives? You’d stopped and waited for her, but you’d never walked next to her, conversing with her, as she wanted—not even once.

  Since your wife has gone missing, your heart feels as if it will explode every time you think about your fast gait.

  You walked in front of your wife your entire life. Sometimes you would turn a corner without even looking back. When your wife called you from far behind, you would grumble at her, asking her why she was walking so slowly. And so fifty years passed. When you waited for her, she stop
ped next to you, her cheeks reddened, saying with a smile, “I still wish you’d go a little slower.” You assumed that was how you would live out the rest of your days. But since that day in Seoul Station when you left on the subway train, that day when she was only a few steps behind you, your wife still hasn’t come to you.

  You raise your leg, the one that was operated on for arthritis, and prop it on the porch, watching the girls wolf down the undercooked rice with only kimchi as panchan. After the surgery, you no longer felt pain or had circulation problems, but your left leg became impossible to bend.

  “Want me to put a hot pad on it?”

  You can almost hear your wife say that. Her hands dotted with dark sunspots, her hands that would put a pot of water on the stove and dampen a towel with the hot water and place it on your knee even if you didn’t answer. Every time you saw her unshapely hands pressing down on the towel on your knee, you hoped that she would live at least one day longer than you. You hoped that, after you died, your wife’s hands would close your eyes one last time, wipe down your cooling body in front of your children, and put the shroud on you.

  “Where are you?” you, whose wife is missing, who’s left behind, shout, your leg stretched out on the porch of the empty house, the girls having run off after they finished eating. You shout, trying not to succumb to the sobs that have been climbing to the top of your throat since your wife went missing. You couldn’t scream or cry in front of your sons or daughters or daughters-in-law, but now, because of the rage or whatever it is, tears are pouring down your face, unstoppable. Tears that didn’t come when your neighbors buried your parents, who died two days apart when cholera made the rounds in the village. Not yet ten years old, you couldn’t cry, even though you wanted to. After your parents’ burial, you walked down from the mountain, shivering, cold, and scared. Tears that didn’t course down your face during the war. Your family used to own a cow. During the day, when South Korean soldiers were stationed in the village, you plowed the fields with that cow. In those days, North Korean soldiers would come down from the mountains into the village under cover of night and drag away people and cows. When the sun set, you would walk into town with the cow, tie it up next to the police station, and go to sleep leaning on the cow’s stomach. At dawn you would bring the cow back to the village and plow the fields. One night, you didn’t go to the police station, because you thought the North Korean soldiers had left the area, but they swarmed into the village and tried to drag the animal away. You wouldn’t let go of the cow, even though they kicked you, beat you up. You ran after the cow, pushing aside your sister, who tried to block you from going, and even when you were beaten with the barrel of a rifle, you didn’t cry. You, who didn’t shed a tear when you were thrown into a water-logged rice paddy with other villagers, having been accused of being a reactionary because your uncle was a detective; you, who didn’t cry when a bamboo spear went through your neck—you are sobbing loudly. You realize how selfish you were to wish that your wife survived you. It was your selfishness that made you deny that your wife had a serious illness. In some corner of your heart, you must have known that your wife, who often appeared fast asleep when you came home at night, kept her eyes closed because her headache was so severe. You just didn’t think about it too hard. At a certain point, you knew that your wife would go outside to feed the dog, but instead would head for the well, or that she would leave the house to go somewhere but would stop in her tracks at the gate, not remembering where she was going, then give up and come back inside. You just watched as your wife crawled into the room, barely managing to find a pillow and lie down, a frown etched on her face. You were always the one in pain, and your wife was the one who looked after you. Once in a while, when your wife said her stomach hurt, you were the kind of person who would reply, “My back hurts.” When you were sick, your wife put a hand on your forehead and rubbed your stomach and went to the pharmacy for medicine and made you mung-bean porridge, but when she wasn’t feeling well, you just told her to take some medicine.

  You realize that you’ve never even handed your wife a glass of warm water when she couldn’t keep food down for days, her stomach upset.

  It all started when you were roaming the country, immersed in playing traditional drums. Two weeks later, you came home, and your wife had given birth to your daughter. Your sister, who’d delivered the baby, said it was an easy birth, but your wife had diarrhea. It was so severe that she didn’t have any color in her face, and her cheekbones were protruding sharply even though she had just had a baby. Her condition didn’t improve. It seemed to you that she wouldn’t get better unless you did something. You gave your sister some money for some Chinese medicine.

  Your sobs grow louder as you sit on the porch of the empty house.

  Now you see that this was the only time you’ve ever paid for medicine for your wife. Your sister bought three packets of Chinese medicine and boiled it and gave it to your wife. Afterward, when your wife had stomach problems, she would say, “If I could have had two more packets of Chinese medicine back then, I would have been cured.”

  Your relatives liked your wife. All you said to them was hello when they arrived and goodbye when they left, but your many relatives came because of your wife. People said that your wife’s food brimmed with love. Even if all she did was to go to the garden and bring in some greens for bean-paste soup and a Chinese cabbage for a simple salted-cabbage dish, people dug in heartily, praising the bean-paste soup and the salted cabbage. Your nephews and nieces would come to stay with you during school vacations and comment that they had gained so much weight that they couldn’t button their school uniforms. Everyone said that the rice your wife made fattened people. When you and your neighbors planted rice in your paddies and your wife brought them a lunch of rice and scabbard fish stewed with new potatoes, people would stop to stuff the food in their mouths. Even passersby would pause to eat. Villagers vied to help in your fields. They said that when they ate your wife’s lunch they got so full that they could do double the amount of work before getting hungry again. If a peddler selling melon or clothing happened to peek inside the gate during the family’s lunch, your wife was the kind of person who would welcome him in and give him a meal. Your wife, who happily ate with strangers, got along with everyone, except with your sister.

  When your wife was suffering from stomach problems, she would complain as if that offense had occurred the day before. “It would have been good if I’d taken two more packets of Chinese medicine back then.… Even you said that I needed two more portions because I’d just had a baby and had to get well, but your sister said, with that mean face, ‘Why do you need more medicine? This is enough.’ And she didn’t get me any more. If I’d taken two more portions I wouldn’t have to go through this.” But you had no recollection of it. And even though she repeated the story, you never got medicine for your wife when she had diarrhea.

  “I should have taken more medicine. Now nothing works.” When your wife had diarrhea, she stopped eating. You didn’t understand how someone could stop eating for days. You ignored it when you were younger; not until you were older did you ever ask if she should eat something. Then your wife would say, with a miserable expression, “Animals don’t eat when they’re sick. Cows, pigs … when they’re sick they stop eating. Even chickens. The dog stops eating when it’s sick. When it’s sick, it doesn’t look at food, even if I give it something good, and it digs a hole in front of its house and lies down in there. A few days later, it’ll get up. And that’s when it will eat. People are the same way. My stomach is not feeling well, and even if the food is great, it’s like poison when it gets inside me.”

  When the diarrhea didn’t stop, she would grate dried persimmons and eat a spoonful. She would refuse to go to the hospital. “How can dried persimmons be medicine? Go to the hospital, and see the doctor, and get medicine from the pharmacy,” you urged her, but she didn’t listen. Finally, if you insisted, she would snap, “Didn’t I say I wasn’t going
to the hospital?” and wouldn’t let you bring it up again.

  One year, you left home in the summer and returned in the winter, and when you got back you found a lump in your wife’s left breast. You remarked that it wasn’t normal, but your wife wasn’t moved. Only when her nipple caved in and was filled with discharge did you take her to the hospital in town, her work towel still wrapped around her head. They couldn’t tell you what it was right away, but examined her and said it would take ten days to get the results back. Your wife sighed. What happened during those ten days? What were you doing that was so important that you didn’t go back to hear the results? Why did you put off going back to find out what was wrong? Finally, when her nipple became abscessed, you took your wife and went back to the hospital. The doctor said your wife had breast cancer.

  “Cancer?” Your wife said that it was impossible: she didn’t have time to lie in bed sick, she had too much to do. The doctor explained that your wife didn’t fit the profile for a high risk of breast cancer. She hadn’t had children late in life, she breastfed all five children, she didn’t get her period when she was very young, since she got it the year she married you, and she didn’t enjoy meat—in fact, she couldn’t afford to. But cancer cells were growing in your wife’s left breast. If you had gone back to hear the results right away, they might not have had to cut off her breast. Soon after the surgery, her chest still wrapped with bandages, your wife planted potatoes in the field. Burying the sprouted potatoes in the field—which now belonged to someone else, because you’d sold it to pay for the surgery—she declared, “I will never go to the hospital again!” Not only did she refuse to go to the hospital, but she also wouldn’t let you come near her.