She lay still. With an expression neither sad, nor joyful, nor painful, nor pleasant, she simply lay there as if asleep. Except for her slightly pale forehead and purplish ears, her complexion was not particularly bad. My grandmother, who raised me in place of my parents who were working, lay like that on a cold stainless steel panel, wearing stiff hemp clothes.
“We have dressed her in clean underwear and prettied her up. The bereaved family, please say your last words to the deceased.” A middle-aged man who said he had personally embalmed the body spoke softly to us. Cries erupted. The cries of my aunt, grandmother’s only daughter, and my mother, who had endured harsh treatment from her mother-in-law. Along with my father’s last words, “You suffered a lot, Mother,” as he held the deceased’s hand, tears silently welled up in the eyes of the three sons.
It was the first time I had directly faced the corpse of a dead person, the corpse of someone I loved. I was too young to clearly remember my grandfather’s deathbed, and when my beloved cousin passed away in New Zealand at the age of twenty-two, I could not go because I had to go to my precious job. And when my maternal grandfather passed away, I arrived late and could not participate in the encoffining ceremony. The first corpse of a dead, loved one that I saw was surreal. It was as if she was just sleeping, as if she would open her eyes if I shook her right now, as if she would get up without any problem if her soul just slipped back into that empty body.
The physical body was the same. But something was empty. Something that made the body move was gone. That clear empty space existed starkly within the seemingly intact body. The one who can breathe life back into that empty body is God, that is the most mysterious of all miracles, the miracle of miracles. A poignant realization swept over my entire body. I had read records of Jesus raising the dead, but I didn’t know it was such a great thing. Because it was someone else’s family’s business. I didn’t realize it was the greatest and most magnificent thing in the world. I thought a miracle that told you lottery numbers in advance was much greater, I didn’t know that breathing a soul back into an empty body was the greatest miracle in the world.
My grandmother, just like when I was little and blew soap bubbles while spinning around her, it felt like she would open her eyes again soon if I just blew something into her with a “whoosh,” but that is impossible. That is the scariest thing in the world. That dying means you can’t get up again.
Looking at my grandmother’s corpse, I deeply engraved that that state is the future of all of us. As the saying goes, there is an order in coming but no order in going, I felt deeply that we don’t know whether it will be in thirty years or three years. Death was the clearest reality of all realities. I clearly confirmed that what is important in life is not one’s alma mater, job, wealth, honor, or power. Because those things have no meaning or distinctiveness for corpses lying on a stainless steel panel wearing hemp clothes. What good is it if your face is printed largely in the newspaper every day, if you drive crowds like swarms of bees, if you fly around in a private jet for a short time? Aren’t all those things ultimately less than even an elementary school soccer game? Only “what awaits me after my imminent death” is the only distinctive test of life, my grandmother clearly taught me that during the past three days and left like that.
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