On My Father's Death

For the past five days, the people in my house haven't been able to recognize me. They think I've suddenly turned cruel. That all my emotions and feelings have vanished. I'm not in a normal state, yet the abnormality that should exist within me at this moment is perhaps absent too. I am neither normal nor abnormal. No one at home knows what's happening inside me. I don't know either what should be happening inside me. I cast my empty gaze toward the street outside my window and stare at it with deep attention. Am I really staring at it with attention?

Father has been gone for five days now. I don't leave my room. Father used to live in the room right next to mine. Father didn't call me very often, nor did I visit him much. We'd have brief conversations when we sat down to eat. Father didn't talk about what I was doing, what I wanted to do with my life. Father would discuss one or two subjects that we could easily have done without discussing. I felt comfortable seeing and knowing Father from a distance. Everyone thinks I don't love Father. Everyone believes that nothing about Father matters to me at all. What I am—no one knows this except me. Nor should they, of course.

From childhood, I received Father as a teacher. Such a teacher who doesn't teach anything of his own accord, yet in whose company much gets learned. I couldn't learn as much from anyone else as I could from Father, even without learning. Father knew the art of teaching without teaching, or even if he didn't know it, it happened by itself. With all my education and understanding, I can feel Father. This matter had never occurred to me before. Why hadn't it?

What I know most about Father is this: my father used to live in the room next to mine. Apart from going to the office, I rarely saw Father go anywhere else from his room. Father's room had many books and still has them. Sometimes I would go to Father's room to borrow books, and I'd ask Father, "How are you, Father?" My unargumentative father seemingly knew nothing or didn't want to say anything beyond "I'm well." We ask "How are you?" only to hear "I'm well." It's also possible that rather than saying "I'm not well," it's better to swallow the badness in one's own way and stay quiet.

I didn't actually go to Father's room to get books. I didn't even properly look through the books I brought from Father's room. Yet why I went to get and return books, I don't know. I only know that I enjoyed bringing books from Father's room. Father was in the next room—beyond this, no other kind of feeling about Father's presence was ever created within me. I never saw Father cry. We thought Father had nothing worth crying about. I suspect this notion was wrong. It's not that Father and I met very often or that I desperately wanted Father's company. Yet it never occurred to me that Father might one day not be in the next room.

Father's smile, Father's gaze, Father's walking, Father's fragments of joy and sorrow, Father's melancholy touched me from a distance. I didn't want to probe into these things. I felt: these things are what make the man! Let Father remain just as he is, the way he likes to be! Neither Father nor I were ever inclined to probe anyone. Father used to say, life is the name for celebrating both sorrow and joy.

I can't bring it into my head that Father is gone. Not that I've tried to bring it in, of course. But I've never known this house without Father or needed to try knowing it. I would wait to hear Father's voice, which Father didn't know. "Son, would you come here for a moment?" When Father couldn't find a book, he would suddenly call me. I felt very good about this. I didn't tell Father this truth. Father might have thought he was bothering me. Father never wanted to bother anyone.

Father kept a water bottle in his room. When Father fell asleep, I would fill the bottle and place it on Father's reading table. The reason was that I felt a kind of hesitation about doing anything for Father in front of him. Father didn't want to have anyone do his work for him. Even if it was difficult, Father preferred to do every task with his own hands. I didn't always get the chance to fill the water bottle; Father would do it himself. But why Father never asked who sometimes filled the water bottle, I don't know.

I never needed to think that Father might one day not be here. Shedding sorrow by crying it away is a very easy path. I can't accept Father's absence so easily. This is perhaps failure. In a life where failure is abundant, this most terrible failure has also wrapped itself around me. I can't cry at all, but I can't laugh either. Everyone keeps coming to me repeatedly, telling me to cry. Seeing them makes me want to run away.

Father isn't here, and I don't want to be here. I feel like "Father is still here!"—beyond this, bringing anything else about Father to mind is impossible for me. I desperately want to go to Father. If I truly went away, its name wouldn't be death, its name would be the desire to stay close. Everyone around me knows so much about death, yet what death actually means doesn't occur to anyone.

I keep going to the next room; some books are lying on Father's bed. Father has a constipation problem. Father takes a long time in the bathroom. Father will surely come out of the bathroom and sit down to read again. During the time of being alive, humans accumulate memories in the greed of remaining alive even after death. Yet Father always seemed ungreedy to me! Tell me, am I feeling sorrow thinking of Father? Or is melancholy enveloping me? It doesn't seem so! What has possessed me isn't called sorrow or melancholy; its name is emptiness.

I'm missing Father, I'm missing my own tears. It feels like there's no greater wealth than being able to cry. Only two paths to staying alive are open before me: either scream and cry, or go to Father. My father was healthy too! Health has no quarrel with death.

How strange! To want to live, one must know how to cry—why did I never learn this simple truth from Father?