Farewell, Soul, Beauty

Tribute to Dad

Photo by Erol Ahmed on Unsplash

My dad passed away two months ago. But it could have been 2 weeks ago or a year ago, I don’t know how time passed since. Time loses relativity when such an occurrence happens.  

Before he passed, dad spent 2 months in the ICU. He had been weak and in and out of the hospital for years, and we thought at first that he’d be back home within a week of admittance like always. But things got worse, then better, then worse. And one day, the doctors said: “he may not survive the next two days”.

But two days turned into a week. A week into two. And two weeks into 40 days. Dad was a fighter. Even under induced sleep, he fought hard against his illness, which could be seen by the changes on his body. The doctors even told us that it was a miracle, a godly intervention that he was getting better. Options of surgeries and treatments were offered on the table. But then, his will alone couldn’t cure him. “While he still breathes, he is already in another realm”, were the exact words the doctors uttered some time later. So we said our goodbyes one last time, and a week later, he succumbed to the ultimate fate of all life.  

The cycle of jolting between high hopes and sunken despair can stir a person phenomenally.  Hope, deception, sadness, guilt, love, regret, fear, revulsion. When I’d find myself alone, undistracted and unable to focus, a spectrum of emotions collided to lapse me into some sort of oblivion, with no possible medium of deliverance, except in frequent instances of long gaping into the void. And alienation became habitual, because there was nothing that people could say to me other than some conventional words of sympathy that became meaningless and insufferable when heard about a thousand times over. 

“Why aren’t you getting married?” Dad asked me once long ago. 

“Because I learned too much from you,” I replied, not to prolong a conversation that I knew was going to turn into a lecture. 

But it was as true as steel. Dad was a man of principles. “Country, company, family.” This was his motto, as he grew up in the decimated postwar era. So he volunteered to fight in the Vietnam War as a reconnaissance man against the communists. And upon completion of his military duties, he dedicated his life to growing his company. Our country’s prosperity was the first and foremost of dad’s concerns, and he never underestimated the power of individuals. Even in his later life, in his wheelchair, he’d say, “if North Korea bombs us again, I’m putting on my uniform and going to the battlefield!” And he’d tear up when the national hymn played on TV. As a kid, dad’s “once a marine, always a marine” army stories at our family’s dinner table gave me an ability to shut my ears and daydream while pretending to actively listen, but I know that it was his unrelenting temperament that kept him going through all the thick and thin of his not-so-easy life. 

But as rigid and principled as he was, warmth and elegance was never lost with dad. In my early school years, on those rare days he was home, not traveling around the world for his company, he would handwrite for me the lyrics of Elvis Presley’s Fools Rush In, and dance with my two feet on his two feet, because he loved his daughter so.

The last conversation I had with dad was before he was hospitalized. He had been under induced sleep during most of his time in the ICU. But even in a state of suspension, in his deathbed, there was still an aura emanating from him. Blood circulation was detectable, as was the warmth on his face, however feeble it felt. And he could still fill the room with his great presence. But once the heart gave in, the body no longer projected energy. Death is mute. Death is cold. And the body became nothing more than a matter of flesh that once housed something much more than a skeleton and organs. 

The heart gives life to a soul. The funeral made me see this. Because we held services to honor the person, not the body. People came to remember dad for his accomplishments, his contributions, his generosity, his friendship, his humanness. What is left of the person when the body is gone. We are different from animals that way. We don’t spend our lives obedient by our survival instincts just to reproduce and replicate genes to live in the wilderness forever. We yearn to achieve great things, and we have honor. So even if the body is ashened and returned to soil, we remember the soul. The soul is the human. 

When a relative said to me (while dad was still in the ICU) “the only thing you can do to help your dad is to awe the heavens,” I headed to a church.  Not because that’s what I usually do. But because it actually was the only thing that I could do. So I went daily to an Eastern Orthodox church in Seoul. Their services consist of the Divine Liturgy on Sundays and shorter prayers on the rest of the week. In a domed architecture filled with murals and golden-leafed portraits of saints and angels, the clergy reads the scripture and officiates sacramental rituals. And a choir sings hymns. It is peaceful, solemn, reverent and mystical. Above all, beautiful. And in that time and space, I found a refuge. Letting my thoughts surrender to the music resounding throughout the church, I felt in communion with something beyond our dimension that spoke to every emotion I felt towards dad. It gave me chills on my back and welled-up my eyes with tears. And I felt that my existence was sacred. Beauty can make you feel that way. Like we are sacred. And I felt comforted. I felt grateful. Because I know that there is a benevolent force behind the things we see that cares about us. And dad would be taken care of. How else could I explain such beauty?

If you consider death purely as the marker of an end to life, it is the biggest tragedy for anyone.  But just as you cannot describe Beethoven’s symphonies by breaking them down into pitches and notes, it is difficult to make sense of human existence as a single-point journey on earth. Because the soul lives on in the memory of people. So it must live on somewhere else. It was time for dad to leave us for another place. His body was a telltale. But I need not be sad, because even though my living relationship with him has ended, my spiritual relationship with him has just begun.

And so, as strange and as cruel as it may sound, I found beauty in the curtain falling on dad.  Beauty in his death. Because I know that he is in a place where nor his sick body nor the forces of men can bring him misery. And even if all this is nothing but my imagination, well… in our world of simulation and stimulation, death is the only mystery left for us to wonder about. And to divine is beautiful.