Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin [45]
“I’m home,” you mumble to the empty house, after Hong Tae-hee leaves.
All you wanted in life was to leave this house—when you were young, after you were married, and even after you had children. The isolation you felt when it struck you that you would spend your entire life in this house, in this dull town stuck to the south of the country, in the place of your birth—when that happened, you left home without a word and wandered the country. And when ancestral rites came around, you returned home, as if following genetic orders. Then you left again, and only crawled back when you became ill. One day, after you recovered from some illness, you learned to ride a motorcycle. You left home again, with a woman who was not your wife on the back. There were times when you thought you would never return. You wanted to forge a different life and forget about this house and set out on your own. But you couldn’t last more than three seasons away.
When the unfamiliar things away from home became commonplace, the things your wife grew and raised hovered before your eyes. Puppies, chickens, potatoes that kept coming out when they were dug up … and your children.
Before you lost sight of your wife on the Seoul Station subway platform, she was merely your children’s mother to you. She was like a steadfast tree, until you found yourself in a situation where you might not ever see her again—a tree that wouldn’t go away unless it was chopped down or pulled out. After your children’s mother went missing, you realized that it was your wife who was missing. Your wife, whom you’d forgotten about for fifty years, was present in your heart. Only after she disappeared did she come to you tangibly, as if you could reach out and touch her.
It’s only now that you clearly see the condition your wife was in for the past two or three years. She had sunk into numbness, would find herself not remembering a thing. Sometimes she would be sitting by a very familiar road in town, unable to find her way home. She would look at a pot or a jar she’d used for fifty years, her eyes wondering, What is this for? She became careless with the housekeeping, with strands of hair all over the house, not swept away. There were times when she couldn’t follow the plot of a television drama that she watched every day. She forgot the song she used to sing for decades, the one that started with “If you ask me what love is …” Sometimes your wife seemed not to remember who you were. Maybe even who she was.
But that wasn’t how it was the whole time.
Your wife would remember some tiny detail, as if she’d recovered something from ever-evaporating water. One day she mentioned how you had once wrapped some money in newspaper and stuck the bundle on the doorjamb before you left home. She told you that, even though she hadn’t said it then, she was grateful you’d left those bills for her. She said she didn’t know how she would have survived if she hadn’t discovered that newspaper-wrapped money. Another time, your wife reminded you that you needed to have a new family picture taken, because the most recent portrait didn’t include your younger daughter’s third baby, who was born in America.
Only now do you realize, painfully, that you turned a blind eye to your wife’s confusion.
When your wife’s headaches made her unconscious, you thought she was sleeping. You wished she wouldn’t lie down with a cloth wrapped around her head and sleep wherever she wanted to. When she was flustered, unable to open the door, you actually told her to look where she was going. Having never thought that you had to take care of your wife, you couldn’t understand that your wife’s sense of time had become jumbled. When your wife prepared slop and poured it in the trough in the empty pigpen and sat next to it, calling the name of the pig you had raised when you were young, saying, “This time, have three piglets, not just one—that would be so