A Letter Never Sent 10
A Letter Never Sent 10
As time passed, my father's breathing grew gradually rougher. The roughness of his breath, like a crescendo in music, had no decrescendo, only crescendo. The intensity of his discomfort and anxiety seemed to grow, reflected in his breath. When would his last breath come? When his breath stops and his heart ceases to beat—then it would truly be the end of my time with him. My father’s breathing was a pattern of inhaling, holding for 3 or 4 seconds, and then exhaling. If it weren’t for the oxygen mask, his breath would have already stopped. Breathing itself was becoming a painful task. I was reminded of the fundamental truth that breathing is the essence of life. The Genesis story, in which God molded man from clay and breathed life into him, reminds us that when the breath leaves the body, life ends, and the body becomes like clay again. Breath is life. And the body, when the breath departs.
On that night at the hospital, as I stayed with my father, I felt, more deeply than ever, the emptiness of life. Sometimes, the sound of my brother snoring seemed unbearably painful. The hardship of living, the sorrow, seemed to spread like ink in the darkness. The sorrow of living, struggling just to breathe, wasn’t only present in my father’s breath, but even in the breath of my younger brother, still relatively young, which made the room feel darker and gloomier.
Through my father's death, my own life had matured a little. As rice ripens, it lowers its head. The eyes that once looked ahead or up can now look downward, at the earth. This is the lesson learned from experiencing death so closely. The act of letting go. Just a few days ago, my father, despite not being able to move, was still able to brush his own teeth. My father, whose posture had always been as rigid as the creases in pants pressed with grass, was now breaking down before the passage of illness and time.
Around 2 a.m., the caregiver entered and changed my father’s diaper. I wondered if my father felt it—the humiliation of having to rely on someone else for his bodily functions. Or maybe, had he surrendered even his dignity and found some freedom in that? Had he reached a state of liberation, finally letting go of everything, walking comfortably toward his final journey? Even if his clothes were wrinkled from wear, they would still be soft and free.
If only I could share even a little of the breath from my healthy lungs with him during his remaining time...
After about half an hour, the nurse came into the room and took my father’s blood pressure. It was in the sixties. When we first came to the hospital, his blood pressure was around eighty. His heart, which had been beating for eighty-two years, was slowly losing its strength. The nurse's act of taking his blood pressure felt as though it was a way to predict when my father’s life would come to an end. The nurse injected something into my father’s arm. It must have been painkillers. My father’s arm was covered in bruises. The dark blue color gave off a feeling of sorrow—like the color of a deep, dark sea. The dark blue of the river at dusk, when standing by the riverbank in late autumn, would almost make me cry. I wondered, could I cry out loud then? For the deep blue pain of life, and may the pain and sorrow, like the river, flow away.
The nurse’s hands, as she administered the injection, glowed white under the dim light. I thought her hands, like the hands of the caregiver changing the diaper, were beautiful. My own hands, which only held my father’s hand when his death was imminent, had not done anything for him until then. I had been hiding in the darkness, ashamed of my own hands, but I held my father’s hand again. His hand was cold.