Death Across the Miles
By Jeffrey Miller
Part of my daily routine, when I wake up every morning and surf the net to see what happened overnight, is to pay a visit to the website of my hometown newspaper back in the United States to keep abreast of local news and sports.
And I also read the obituary column.
I know that might sound a little morbid to see who has passed away but I think it is a part of our own mortality with growing old, or as my grandfather once told me, to see if there were any funerals they would have to attend.
The other week, when I was reading a few online stories and yes, the obituary columns, I discovered that someone who I had gone to high school with had passed away. I didn't know him that well when I was in high school; indeed, we never even had any classes together.
However, in later years when I was a university student, I met him again through a mutual acquaintance and had the chance to hang out a few times. He was only 50 years old when he passed away.
And it got me thinking again about what happens when you are thousands of miles from home and someone you know back home dies. When you are living and working overseas, there's probably no greater tragedy or hardship for an expat when a family member or loved one passes away back home. You might call it one of the unwritten, unspoken occupational hazards that we all know in the back of our minds can happen to any of us at any time.
Sometimes it is that phone call in the middle of the night from a family member or friend that gets your heart pounding as you nervously pick up the receiver expecting the worse on the other end.
Other times it's through more official channels like being notified by an embassy official that someone in your family has passed away. Either way, your life is turned upside down as your scramble to try and get a flight home to be with your loved ones, family, and friends.
A few of my family members and some mutual acquaintances have passed away since I have been in Korea and six years ago this week my wife died while spending some time with her family in Thailand.
Aside from being the lowest point for me in all the years that I spent in Korea, my wife's death was all the more tragic for me because I was the one who discovered that she had died.
My wife, who had gone to Thailand a few months earlier to visit her family, had taken ill not long after she arrived. Although she was rushed to the hospital and spent almost a week recovering, she persuaded me not to come to Thailand. She didn't want me to take any time off work, (in 2001 I was writing a lot for this paper as well as teaching a full schedule at Yonsei's Foreign Language Institute) and she assured me that she was feeling better.
The last time we talked was three days before I flew to Thailand. Although she didn't want to tell me how sick she was _ as not to make me worry _ she reminded me again to bring her some Korean pears, hot pepper paste, Korean rice cakes (she wanted to make tteokbokgi) and kimchi.
When she failed to meet me at Bangkok's Don Muang airport, I went to the apartment she was staying at while she was in Thailand and discovered her body. Later, after an autopsy had been performed I would learn that her time of death was right around the time I was flying over the East China Sea. I had just missed being with her one last time by only a few hours.
After the funeral in her village north of Chiang Mai a few days later, I was back on a plane to Korea. What else was I supposed to do? I didn't even have time or the chance to notify friends, family, or colleagues until after I had come back to Korea.
Although I might have been better taking some time off and maybe even going back to the States for a while, I was probably better off being back in Korea with many people who remembered my wife when she lived here. I don't think I could have handled the grief as well as I did if it hadn't been for many of the people I worked with who helped me out immensely in the weeks after I returned.
One week later I was back in the classroom teaching as well as writing again. In the end, teaching and writing for the next few years would be a catharsis of sorts for me, which helped me cope with the loss of my wife and allowed me to get on with my life the best I could.
When we lose someone close to us or hear of someone else who has suffered a loss, we are again reminded of our own mortality and the emotional strain of being separated from our loved ones and family.
The loss of a loved one while we are living and working overseas reminds us of the emotional risks we take choosing this kind of lifestyle. It's something that we know in the back of our minds that could always happen, but it's something that we can never know how we will deal with it until it actually happens.
The writer, who is currently teaching at Woosong University in Daejeon, has been a regular contributor and feature writer for the Korea Times since 1998.