A Time of Sadness

On Saturday last, September 26, around ten o’clock in the evening, the phone rang. Three times it rang, and then kicked over to voice-mail, not enough time for us to pick it up. The caller left a message. It was a message no father wants to hear. My – let’s call him my Korean son – was in hospital. Fumbling over the numbers, dialling the wrong number; batteries in the phone dying; eventually I got through. There had been a car accident; my Korean son was asking for me. Biologically he’s not my son. I haven’t legally adopted him either. But my wife and I love him as though he were our own. I’m his ‘Canadian dad’ and he’s my ‘Korean son’.

The drive to the hospital was crazy. On the way I fretted. Had he bought a car? I knew he was going to buy one. Was he driving? Who was going to pick up his mom from the airport? Such is shock – I knew his mom was arriving at noon that day, and this was ten in the evening. What would his mother say? She’d probably been waiting all day for him. But that’s OK – I would pick him up from the hospital; we’d go to the airport, pick her up, and bring her home. We’d be OK. At least he was safe.

But it wasn’t like that at all. The Emergency Room staff took me to him, and just before I entered the curtained off area I asked who was going to pick up his mother from the airport. The social worker did an immediate U-turn, saying that the doctor was with my Korean son and that I needed to wait in a small privacy room. There they told me that there was a woman in the car with him – an older woman – and the police did not know who she was. His mother, I said - was she OK? I watched as the social worker sadly shook her head. Did she survive the accident? No. A small word never had such finality.

Our son and his mother were rear-seat passengers in the car; they were strapped in; the driver – one of our son’s closest friends – lost control on a confusing section of road. He wasn’t travelling fast either. The car skidded and slammed into a lamp-post. And now our son was in the ER with spinal fractures, broken ribs, internal bleeding from his liver and kidneys, broken collarbone… and his mom was dead. He held her hand as she slipped away. He told me later that he prayed in the ambulance that she would survive, but felt a great peace descend on him; that he felt God saying to him that his mother was with Him.

They took me to see him. He was lying flat on a bed, unmoving, except for his eyes. Could he move? Thank God, yes. Despite the spinal fractures, he still had full use of all his limbs. And then the question I’d been dreading: he said he couldn’t phone his father – would I do it? Yes, I told him. I would. He gave me his father’s home number and his father’s cell number. I tried phoning his father from my cell-phone, but mine doesn’t allow international calls. So I waited with our son until he was in the critical care unit, until I had spoken to the doctor, until I had spoken to the police. The police said they would phone; I said no, I would do it. When our son drifted off into a drugged sleep I drove home and steeled myself for the task I had to do.

I tried the home number first. No reply. It was six o’clock in the evening in Korea – was he at church? I prayed and then dialled his cell number. He answered. I told him I had terrible news – that his son was in critical condition in the hospital and that his wife did not survive. I did not know he was driving at the time – he pulled over and stopped. My wife is dead? How did it happen? An accident, I told him. I’m sorry. Again he asked me, several times, and all I could answer was that I was sorry. He told me he was on his way home and asked that I phone him in thirty minutes.

He phoned me back in less than fifteen minutes. Is my wife dead? Again I told him I was sorry, yes: she did not survive the accident. I focussed on his son. He asked what he should do; I told him he should come to Canada immediately. I told him who the driver was, that it was a tragic accident. I told him I would do whatever I could to help him.

It was only as I lay fretting in bed did I realise what I’d done to this man – the father of the son that I have borrowed as my own… Our first child – a boy – was born at twenty-two weeks. The doctors told me he wouldn’t live long. I cradled that beautiful child in my arms, praying that God would send a miracle, that he would survive. It was only some two hours later when his perfect little body grew cold in my arms did I realise he was dead. I wished then that the doctors had told me direct: your son is dead. But they didn’t. They gave me two hours of clinging to meaningless hope; they let me work it out for myself. My son was dead. I promised myself that I would never do to another person what they did to me. Yet, in the early Canadian hours of last Sunday morning and the beginning of the Korean night, I did exactly that to my Korean son’s father: I did not tell him directly that his wife was dead. Each time he asked me if his wife was dead I said I was sorry. I gave him ten or fifteen minutes of meaningless hope: maybe this Canadian man was saying that he was sorry because she was badly injured; why was he saying he was sorry? No, she couldn’t be dead! He asked me, and I did not say ‘yes’ – all I said was that I was sorry. And only later did he coax that word out of me: ‘yes’. Those two words carry such finality: did she survive? No. Is my wife dead? Yes.

After a couple of hours sleep I returned to the hospital. I was there when my Korean son’s aunt and cousins arrived from Toronto. I was there when his father phoned to tell me that he was flying out to Vancouver the next day and could I meet him at the airport and take him to the hospital. And I couldn’t stop crying. I’m almost forty-nine years old; I have grey hair and a white beard, and yet I cried like a baby. My son was hurt physically and emotionally. His father and sister were grieving. His mother was dead.

Yet in that time I saw compassion. The young man who was the driver came to the hospital on Sunday morning. He has torn knee ligaments and a broken ankle. If he could have gone down on his knees to beg forgiveness from our Korean son’s aunt, he would have done so. He was devastated. Yet the family put aside their grief to comfort him. I don’t speak Korean; I know but a few words. One of them is what sounds like ‘araso’ – OK. And the sight of the aunt cradling the crying young man’s face into her bosom, stroking his hair saying a few soft words and then ‘araso’. I didn’t need a translation: I knew what she was saying. It was an accident. You shouldn’t blame yourself, OK? And again when the father arrived, this devastated young man apologised to him and the father did exactly the same thing. The driver’s mother arrived on the same flight: she too came to apologise for what her son had done.

I have learned several things in all of this: I have experienced the compassion Korean people show to each other; I have learned that another man’s son can quite easily be my own son in love if not in deed. I have seen what forgiveness is and I will strive to change my own life to emulate theirs. In my clumsy Caucasian way I try and bow to them. You truly are noble people. God bless you in your time of grief, and praise God in your time of healing.