Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin [19]
“Mom, what are you talking about? How can you believe that, when you go to church?” You thought of the empty doghouse next to the shed, and the chain on the ground. You put an arm around Mom’s waist.
“I dug a deep grave in the yard and buried him.”
Your mom always did tell imaginative stories. On the night of an ancestral rite, Father’s sister and other aunts would come over with bowls of rice. It was when food was scarce, so they would all contribute. After the ancestral rites, your mom would fill the relatives’ bowls with food for them to take home. During the rites, the bowls of rice sat in a row nearby; afterward, Mom said that birds had flown in and perched on the rice, then left. If you didn’t believe her, she’d say, “I saw them! There were six birds. The birds are our ancestors, who came to eat!” The others laughed, but you thought you could see their footprints in the white rice. Once, Mom went to the fields in the early morning, bringing along a snack for later, but someone was there already, bent over and pulling weeds. When she asked who he was, he said he was passing by and stopped to pull weeds because there were so many. Mom and the stranger weeded together. She was grateful, so she shared the snack she had brought. They talked about this and that and weeded the field and went their separate ways when it got dark. When she came back from the field and told Father’s sister that she had weeded with the stranger, Father’s sister stiffened and asked what he looked like. “That used to be the owner of that field. He died of sunstroke one day while he was weeding the field.” You asked, “Mom, weren’t you scared to be in the field with a dead person all day?” But your mom replied nonchalantly, “I wasn’t scared. If I’d had to weed that field all by myself, it would have taken two or three days. So I’m just grateful he helped me.”
After your visit, you noticed how your mom’s headaches seemed to be eating away at her. She quickly lost her outgoing personality and vivacity, and started to lie down more often. Your mom couldn’t even concentrate on card games with hundred-won bets, which were among the few joys in her life. And her senses became dull. One day, after she put a pot of rags on the gas range to bleach them, your mom crumpled on the floor of the kitchen and couldn’t get back up. All the water evaporated, the rags began to burn, and the kitchen was enveloped in smoke, but your mom couldn’t snap out of it. The house might have gone up in flames if a neighbor hadn’t come in to see what was going on, after catching a glimpse of the column of smoke in the air.
Your sister, who has three kids, once asked you a question about your mom and her constant headaches: “Do you think Mom liked being in the kitchen?” Her voice was low, serious.
“Why do you ask?”
“Somehow I don’t think she did.”
Your sister, who was a pharmacist, opened her pharmacy while pregnant with her first child. Your sister-in-law babysat for the infant, but she lived far from the pharmacy. The baby lived with your sister-in-law for a while. Your sister, who’d always loved children, ran the pharmacy even though she could see her baby only once a week. It was wrenching to watch her part with her baby. There couldn’t have been a farewell as sorrowful as that. But your sister seemed to have more trouble with the situation than the baby. While he adapted to his life away from his mother fairly well, she drove him back to your sister-in-law’s at the end of each weekend crying, her tears drenching her hands as they gripped the steering wheel on the way home, and on Monday she stood in her pharmacy with her eyes swollen from weeping. It was so bad that you would say, “Do you really need to go to such lengths to run a pharmacy?” When your sister’s husband was to go to the United States for two years of training, your sister closed the pharmacy, which