A Strange Visit

I didn't bother popping in my contacs or even shaving. I threw on some jeans and some old hiking boots, then headed for the station. I'd never been to the place before, but since it's a stop between my apartment and the best place in Seoul to eat, I knew how to get there just on a few words in a text message my boss sent a few hours earlier.

I've seen all of my grandparents, one uncle on my dad's side, and my mom all pass on to the hereafter. By the time it was my mom's turn, I'd grown so used to death and my unusually short life expectancy that I was almost completely numb. But this was different, and when I got the phonecall as I was about to head off to bed Thursday night, it hit me like a ton of bricks.

Of course, I didn't go there Thursday night, or Friday. My boss was there, and had only told me the news because he felt bad about asking me to do extra classes again. After pulling 11 classes on Friday, 5 with Kindergarteners ( one of which was actually two classes we had to combine because we were short-handed ) and 6 with Elementary kids, I wasn't good for much of anything else.

I sent my boss a text asking about it Saturday morning, and he said enough of the shock had worn off that people could visit. Korea University Hospital, one of the best hospitals in Korea, is a really beautiful place. It's built into the side of a hill in such a way that, even as high as the fourth or fifth floor, you can walk outside and be standing on solid ground, around a semicircle of earth sprinkled liberally with short trees and flowers. I find myself thinking that in a perfect world, all the hospitals I had to visit to see dying family would have had the same ambience. But in a perfect world, noone would ever get sick or die, and we wouldn't need hospitals.

They even have the fourth floor marked with the letter "F" on the elevators, staircases, and everywhere else. Instead of a number, they write the letter, because the Chinese character for the number 4 is the same as the word for "death". It's a common ( but not absolute ) practice, even now, to see elevators in Korea marked in similar fashion.

I don't see Len when I first walk in. His wife is sitting next to someone, although now, less than a week later, I can't even remember who it was. I wanna say it was her brother, but the haze of memory is already settling over it. The only thing I'm really certain of is that his wife was in the waiting area with someone else, and that someone else was someone I had met before. She tells me that Len's outside, and shows me where he is.

When I get out there, Len's sitting by himself on a bench on the far side of a concrete courtyard surrounded on two sides by walls of calm trees not much higher than a man and gentle ferns and bushes. He spots me over the empty space, stands up, and walks down to meet me. The courtesy of always smiling when you meet someone at a hospital is one neither of us observes this time. As we walk back through the building and onto a walkway along the edge of the building, one facing the concrete jungle, he recounts to me what I knew a day ago. Len knows that my boss has told me all of this, but I listen patiently in the hope that there might be some good news I haven't heard yet.

Of course, there isn't. The look on his wife's face the moment I saw her wouldn't lie. If there was any good news, Len, one of the most carefree people I've ever known, wouldn't be so somber.

Jasmine is as good as dead. She got sick, then couldn't swallow properly. Water got trapped inside her lungs, she went into a coma from lack of oxygen, and for a day and a half now she's lived only because machines are pumping air in and out of her body. A day ago my boss told us there was so much brain damage from the lack of oxygen that, even if she does wake up, Jasmine will never be the same again.

As we walk outside, I say the same things I've said to myself a thousand times in the last day and a half. Things I said to myself because I couldn't understand what happened, not because I was rehearsing. After working with Len for nearly three years, I still can't really think of anything seriously bad to say about him. Everyone who knows Len gets along with him. I've never seen him have a disagreement with anyone. It isn't just because he's built like an ox, either. Len's just the sort of guy that gets along with everyone without even trying to.

Jasmine got that from her father. I've never seen such a happy baby. She smiled whenever anyone looked at her or gave the faintest hint of attention. A lot of babies will cry when they see a man they don't know who smells like he's been smoking, or, in Korea, when they see a foreign man it will set them off sobbing. Not Jasmine. Nothing ever seemed to dampen her mood. She was always smiling and laughing. Jasmine was growing really fast, and the doctors talked about what an exceptionally strong, healthy baby she was.

Len offers me a cigarette. He knows I quit smoking nearly two years ago, but he also knows I still enjoy one every now and then. As I'm taking a smoke out of the pack, I notice Len's smoking Dunhill Lights, the same brand one of my best friends smoked before he went back home a few months ago.

He tells me that he needs at least a month off after this. Len says he's pretty sure he can't go back to teaching again. This is more serious for Len than for the rest of us, because most ESL teachers here don't have graduate degrees in teaching. Says it hurts so much every time he sees a kid walking by in the hospital. He's barely slept, he tells me. All the while, I don't really know what to think.

As a child, my dad conditioned me to deal with death. Dying is a part of living. There's nothing to really be sad about. My dad said this right up until my mom got sick. Even then, when he collapsed, I stayed calmer than people who had been a lot less close to her than I was. But this is different. Everyone else I've seen die was over 50. They had at least one child that was an adult. They'd led full lives. Jasmine hadn't even started talking yet.

Some things in life are just hard to understand.