A suicide disturbance

“Didn’t your mom have committed suicide?” I was dumbfounded when an acquaintance of mine in Seoul said.

I did not see my mother's death. When I called my home in Seoul, my father said, she went to the temple. My cousin in Los Angeles keep calling me said, something happened at my home in Seoul. So I called my intuition and asked. Finally my father said, that mom died two months ago.

My mother is not in the world. It's been two months since I did not know. I can’t see my mother who loves me without getting anger or being beaten up! I had been crying in the bathroom almost everyday and regained stability when I gave birth to first child three years later. The death of my mother was a suicide! I can't believe.

I remembered a white ambulance that was driving away from me when I was telling her not to make nonsense comments.

A couple with a daughter lived on the third floor of our building. The couple fought every day. The sound of throwing things, the screaming of women, and the crying of a child was continuous. When the door slammed and the man stepped out, the woman would sob. She wants to die because her husband wants to divorce to live with a woman who has been unfaithful. I used to listen to my mother comforting her.

One day, on the way back from school, people were swarming around a white ambulance in front of the building. The apartment door where the lady was living was open. I entered the apartment with curiosity. I could not help but wonder about the place I imagined while listening to the sound of crushing and crying across the day.

As soon as I entered, I was horrified to see the fresh red blood stains on the wall. Countless bloodstained hand-scratched, trace followed the wall. The traces seemed to be the marks of trying to live on the brink of death. She closed the window, turned the gas on, and committed suicide.

Shortly after her death, her husband walked past the front of the building, flirting with a lady who made her makeup as if he had pulled out his sick tooth. Later, according to the adults, he had a family with her. I remembered that I asked, "What about the poor kid who cried?"

It is also surprising that the suicide bustle of nearly 40 years of ago is still in the mouths of people, but the suicide of a woman on the third floor was misrepresented as my mother's death on the fourth floor.

Fortunately, as a child, I meddled in every single incident that happened to neighbors and my relatives and watched how it worked. Otherwise, the happen would have been hit by a group of local women who were sensitive to other people's business.