Kim Seung-jong's Literary Miscellany (176) 'Now, Please Go'

Father lying in the ICU

When his breath keeps fading away

Mother speaks into his ear

Driving it home

Now, please go

Don't let those bastard kids put on airs

Father, stepping over the threshold to the afterlife

Suddenly opens his eyes wide

Grabs the IV line

The needle stuck in his hand

Trembles along the vein

Startled, I grasp his hand

He looks at me intently

Why come when you're so busy

- "The Moment of Passing" / Oh Bong-ok

The hospital room scene depicted in this poem may vary depending on the reader, but it will generally be familiar enough. Then the wife's words to her dying husband [Stanza 4] and the father's words to his son [Stanza 9] would be even more so. We've heard countless stories even more tragic than this—tales of elderly parents who hide a child who deceived them and abandoned them on the street, only to be transferred to a facility. So even if we don't agree with the argument that poetry must present life's aspects we easily overlook or extraordinary and rare tales, we might not feel compelled to read this poem again.

Yet despite this, this poem seems to have in place factors that make us read it again. Though readers' views may differ on this too. The clue that leads us into the hidden layers of this poem might be "gazes intently" in line 2 of Stanza 8. It is unclear whether this is just before his passing, but at a moment so urgent, the father [referred to as "ul-abi"] who has been swept up in escalating emotions and has reached their extreme looks at his son [the speaker] in this way. We are made to notice not only the father's concentrated gaze and the time that passes, which cannot be called short, but above all, to comprehend a complex and fierce state of mind that is difficult to categorize. To be clear, we must not believe that this state of mind is represented by the final stanza's "Why come when you're so busy." While that remark can be said to be part of the father's inner state, it can never be the whole of it, and even then it may be virtually unrelated to that state of mind.

In other words, this poem causes us to estimate, perhaps for the first time, the state of mind related to the father's "gazing intently." First, we must consider how the father might have heard the wife's words, which initially seemed familiar to us. Those words the wife spoke, pressing them into his "ear" as if driving them home—"Now, please go / Don't let those bastard kids put on airs." In such a helpless situation, could those words, which make sense, have been taken into his "ear" willingly? It would not. Rather, they must have grated on him terribly, and an ominous irritation would have risen up.

I know well the "bastard kids putting on airs," and why would you tell me to "stop" dying for such a reason? But now that I think about it, do you think I overlook such "airs" because I want to live longer? Don't you understand how I struggle and suffer each time I almost feel like I'm dying but can't? Do you not know this? Even if you do, what can I do...

Other readers making different inferences might also acknowledge that such regret on the father's part is possible. If we consider Stanza 5, "Father, stepping over the threshold to the afterlife / Suddenly opens his eyes wide," and Stanza 6, "Grabs the IV line," in the context above. In other words, Stanza 5 can be seen as a depiction of the father's resistance to the wife's words, and Stanza 6 as an act of resistance stemming from that irritation. Of course, we cannot be certain. But if we also view the following Stanza 7, "The needle stuck in his hand / Trembles along the vein," as a description that represents [metonymically] the lingering emotions in the father's heart, we can estimate that possibility even more.

If that is the case, then when the son, the speaker in Stanza 8, is "startled" and "grasps" his own "hand" in support, the father must have been greatly pleased. Ah, my son not only understands my feelings but does not follow mother's words. So the irritation from just before must have been soothed like his own "hand" being "grasped" by his son's hand. As his entire body was recharged with the warm touch of his son's hand, felt through the skin for the first time in a long while, and the care and affection transmitted through that warmth. And so he would once again acknowledge that wife's well-reasoned yet vexing words. That is why the father suddenly uttered, "Why come when you're so busy." These words are what he has always said to his son and are an expression of genuine consideration.

Yet at the same time, it could be ironic. Even if your circumstances are as they are, when your father is caught between life and death, how is it that you entrust me to your mother and appear so infrequently—it would be difficult to exclude the possibility that this is an expression of unspeakable regret.

A story I heard from two acquaintances a few days ago. The wife nagged without regard to the circumstances and responded with accusations and anger, and no matter how much they argued, she would not relent. But when their son stepped in and said the mother's words were wrong, the wife said nothing further, and the fire was extinguished. Yet the son's words were merely what they themselves had said several times before. So we were puzzled. Was it because the son was their source of pride and more precious than her husband? We found this quite plausible but could not be satisfied, so with a self-deprecating sentiment, we wondered if it was because the husband could be of different blood and thus someone else, but the son could not. Then we laughed at ourselves for being futile, but the words an old mother spoke to a son and daughter-in-law who bicker while prioritizing their own thoughts came to mind. After all, the person with whom one can communicate and rely on with an easy heart is one's wife and husband. I recalled how a woman who used to criticize her husband as she went around the village wept often, longing for her husband after his death. While changes in sentiment according to circumstances are only human nature.

What if in Stanza 4 of the above poem, the wife had said, "Now, let's go together"? Even if the subsequent lines remained the same, Stanza 6 could be interpreted as an expression of his refusal, and it would still have been a poem worth reading again. This intrusion is improper impertinence toward the poet, but it rather brings to the fore an aspect of this poem that we must not overlook. The intent in the following blank spaces of this poem—to allegorize with something akin to enlightenment a lifetime of birth, aging, illness, and death that none of us can escape. Moreover, the sentiment of sadness without injury.