अ Novel

Episode 16:Pain

Pain. A horrible moniker of an indivisible human suffering. When does it come from, where is it made, and why does it come to us?

I know it. I've suffered pain of a variety of categories. I had suffered an extreme degree of abdominal pain as a kid. I'd actually grabbed stomach and rolled over on the room floor, screaming and panting. Then grandma had picked out a panacea for that kind of emergency: a small chunk of black matter.

Grandma had pieced eye mucus amount, that is, a very small amount off it, and put it on a spoon, mixed with water, and made me sip it. Then it disappeared. That was a real magic. Grandma was a magician cum doctor.

I've now pain on both knee arthritis casually and geographically. Waist pain on annual or biennial basis and more often than not chest pain also. I've long taken ingeolmee so that I can release or protect from abdominal pain.

I suffer chest pain from time to time, over losses of this sort or that. My heart aches everytime when I think of mother of 94, who has been taken care of my brother. I should have dropped by often and with my family. I am so powerless about that. My first sister, who had "gone to the mountain hills", deigns to come down from time to time for her worldly mother in her waning years, which I appreciate that.

Pain is a lonesome experience. When I was having this pain or that grabbing head or stomach all night, the other room mate of mine was having a sweet sleep. When my dad was wriggling over with the pain of an stomach endoscope or something, docs and nurses were sharing chats about summer vacations, giggling on and on.

We're not supposed or suggested to replicate the experiences of the others, so much so that Jesus' crucifixion, which had been designed to bear the burden of the worldly people's sins, is judged to have been very unique. Yet, all the worldly confusion and conflicts attest to the difficulty and impossibility of the sacrifice for the others' pain: Pain is a lonesome experience.

Hundreds of thousands of the troops of the United Nations Armed Forces, who fought, and several tens of thousands of the troops who were killed here in South Korea, demonstrated in a fatal way a rare exemption to the principle of the lonesome pain. They pained themselves for us South Koreans. We appreciate that.

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This alternative medicine or that was tried. Some effective-claiming medicine, mainly for the pain relief, was airborne from Tokyo. His patience worn out. Father was having a hard time even sipping drops of water. The strong man of a stout build shrank to the skeleton of a man of a mere 49 kilo grams. Father wanted to "depart."

Mother raised her hand and suggested in a very appealing way to his husband he "delay his departure" for some months. It was a cold winter so he was supposed to do that in a warmer season, that is, next spring or something.

On the morning of the 15th of March by a lunar calendar, father said as if talking to himself, "I am going today." He climbed up his bed and stretched his body in full recline. My Buddhist nun sister, who had been staying for several days for the occasion, was standing at his death bed, and started banging a moktak, a hollow wooden vase sounder and chanting some mantra for the departing soul.