'I cannot live without you'
.jpg?w=728)
By Jake J. Nho
“I cannot live without you.” This is the title of a drama which ran in Korea recently. I cannot say on which days it ran but cable channels have the uncanny ability to collect them and throw them at you over the weekend.
There are all kinds of complex relationships, most of which I have not been able to keep track of but there is that one which really touched me and stayed in my mind.
It is about this couple I presumed who were about 60 years of age and the wife suddenly falls victim to dementia. I did not know what a terrible illness this was until I saw those episodes.
Apparently, there is no cure. As a victim, you progressively lose your mind and memory and there is no treatment. It is only a matter of how fast it takes to the end.
This was a devoted wife whose husband left her about 30 years ago after falling for a younger woman and together bore a son, who eventually became a court judge.
He returned home about seven years after he left and remained faithful ever since but the experience had left a permanent pain in his wife’s heart which in a way led to her dementia.
As she began to lose her mind, talking to the mirror and taking on other identities, her husband stood by her and decided that he would accompany her to a rehabilitation center and spend the rest of their lives there.
And he said to her, “I don’t care that you forget things all the time. I will tell you about them every day and remind you of them every day.”
Around the final episode, the woman wakes up at dawn, picks up her bag and heads to a rehabilitation center that the family does not know about, She was not willing to be a burden to her family anymore.
That morning, the husband woke up, found his wife gone, gathered his family ― a brother, three sons and a daughter ― and set out to find the missing woman.
Although the rehabilitation center where she was staying denied her staying at the facility, at her insistence, they finally found her after tracking down a number in her mobile phone which she left in the refrigerator.
She came home and lived happily ever after, or we will never know since the drama came to an end at that point.
As I was watching the episodes, I thought about my grandmother who was fine for the first 84 years of her life but lost it in her final year and my mother had to go through the pain ―both physical and in her heart ― of taking care of her.
She finally passed away on Nov. 22, 1986 and this is a day I never forget. Not for the laborious chores that my mother had to suffer but because she had been such an angel to me.
In my younger days before my family immigrated to Singapore ― that would be the 1960s ― she made sure that there was beef on my table for lunch and dinner. At that time, my father’s business was not doing so well and beef was hard to come by.
When I look back at her memory ― she would have been 110 years old this year if she had been alive ― I always cry because I did not have the chance to give her back even the smallest part of what she had given me.
Bit regretting it now has little meaning. I will serve a mass as my mother always does on that day and try to keep memories of her alive.
She is now buried at the Moran Park in Maseok, Gyeonggi Province, not far from Seoul and we used to visit several times a year when my children were younger.
With the kids all grown up and running on tight schedules ― much tighter than mine, I must say ― it is difficult to find the time to make the trip there.
But this year, I think we will have to make the time, one way or another.
Jake J. Nho is head of online operations at The Korea Times. He can be reached at jakenho@koreatimes.co.kr or jakenho@hotmail.com.