65. A Call at Dawn

Early in the morning, the phone rang. A call that comes in the middle of the night or at the break of dawn is usually bad news. When Semi broke her arm at a church retreat, the phone rang early in the morning; when my mother fell in the living room, the call came at dawn, too.

 

Taking the call, my wife’s face crumpled, and she soon burst into tears. I wondered if something had happened to my father-in-law in Chungju. But the call was actually from her sister-in-law in Seoul. My brother-in-law, who had gone to work over the weekend, was found unconscious and was currently in a coma. Just hearing the brief details made it sound extremely serious. My wife hurriedly secured a plane ticket and flew to Korea.

 

My brother-in-law had complained of a severe headache starting the day before and had taken pain medication that morning before heading to the office. His "company" was a small, struggling business where he worked alongside just one or two employees. The severe headache, it turned out, was because a blood vessel in his brain was already leaking, causing his intracranial pressure to rise. A neighboring shop owner found him collapsed and called 119.

 

He had high cholesterol that he left unmanaged, and he smoked heavily—a classic mistake young people make when they are overly confident in their health. A few days later, he was ultimately declared brain-dead. He left behind a 9-year-old daughter and a 7-year-old son.

 

On the morning of my commute—the day before my wife was scheduled to return home after the funeral—I was involved in a major traffic accident. Suddenly, with a loud thud, a massive impact shook my body. For a moment, I could not comprehend what had just happened. Shortly after, as I realized I had been in a car crash, the police car was already arriving. A car switching lanes at high speed had rear-ended me. The back of my car was crushed, and the rear wheels collapsed. In the end, the car was totaled.

 

My wife who returned from Korea was a different person entirely. Every day, at any given moment, she would sit slumped in a corner and weep. When I came home from work, I would find her staring blankly at photos of her brother on the computer. He was special to her. Having lost their mother at an early age, they lived with their grandparents, away from their remarried father. My wife had cared for him—sometimes like a brother, sometimes like a son.

 

There was nothing I could do. I believed that time would heal her, but I wondered if she could endure those years of waiting. When she wept while telling me that they had decided to take him off life support and let him go, I comforted her by saying that if needed, raising his children well was the best thing we could do for him.

 

I am not an emotional person. I do not sink into deep wells of emotion to grieve or rage for long. When something cannot be changed, I quickly come to terms with it. My brother-in-law’s death was beyond my control, but helping the children he left behind was something within my power. In particular, the older child, Minseo, was a niece my wife adored. I also hoped that taking the children in and raising them might soothe my wife's grief over losing her brother.

 

I did not know my brother-in-law well, nor did I ever have the chance to get close to him. Running his own business, he was always busy. We had never sat down for a long conversation. At most, we had shared a few meals together in passing and occasionally exchanged formal greetings over the phone.

 

There is one thing that continuously weighs on my conscience. Late the previous year, he had hinted at wanting to visit the US with his children. I told him that money was tight around the holidays and winter days were short, so it would be better to come in the summer instead. No one knows what tomorrow holds, but if I had known things would turn out like this, I should have told them to come then.

 

When summer break arrived, my sister-in-law and the children came to visit us. After spending about a month together, doubt began to creep in: Could I really raise these children? They were so different from how I remembered my own kids at that age. The children were ill-mannered, stubborn, threw tantrums, and did not respect the adults.

 

After they left, I told my wife that I did not have the confidence to raise them—that I wanted to take back my promise to care for them.