One Last Look Before You Leave

My Father has this inscrutable expression in his immigration photo - alternately smiling, stoic, and sorrowful like an Eastern Orthodox Icon. I can project onto his 34 year old face a grieving for the home he left behind and his hope for what lay ahead. 

 

Cigarette smoke reminds me of him like Church incense. He was a Marlboro Man and my Mother, a nurse, argued with him for years about quitting. When the long-dreaded lung cancer prognosis finally came, we all prayed for his healing, but more so, we prayed that the Lord would use the cancer to crack open his hardened heart. 

 

My parents are Korean Catholic Immigrants who settled in Chicago in the 1970s. Like the Italians, Polish, Irish and Germans before us, they brought their courage, their faith and a hope of making their new country proud. So at Queen of Angels Church off of Western Avenue between the English and Spanish Masses, there appeared a Korean Novus Ordo Liturgy celebrated by an Irish priest who spoke fluent Korean. What a beautiful slice of America.

 

For many of my parents’ generation, their degrees and professional backgrounds didn’t quite translate to American society. So former executives and college graduates started over, opening up liquor stores and dry cleaners. After his engineering degree didn’t launch a career as he’d hoped, my Father went to trade school for heating and cooling repair. He took pride in serving his longtime customers all over the city and the repairs for his friends were always pro bono. But he knew his dignity most fully in his church community where he gave generously of himself.

 

When he died, I heard many stories about his faith. Huddled together in a new country, he showed the other couples how to pray the Rosary and entrust their uncertainties to the Blessed Mother. He taught catechism to the younger members with the care of an older brother and introduced them to the flavors of Kentucky Fried Chicken and Dunkin’ Donuts. As council president, he lobbied for permission from the Archdiocese of Chicago to found a home parish. After being denied for years, he wrote them a check for their entire community savings of 250 grand. It was a bold, controversial gesture that said “We entrust ourselves to you. You are our shepherds.” Months later, they received a letter granting them permission to found Korean Martyrs’ Catholic Church of Chicago. And the check back, uncashed.

 

His latter years would be marked by heartbreak. After he and his siblings survived the Korean War together and emigrated all the way to the United States, his youngest sister took her own life. As he was the eldest brother, he was haunted by the guilt of failing to protect her. Then during a long recovery after a brain aneurysm from lifting a water heater, he reluctantly accepted a stipend from our insistent pastor for air conditioning repairs he typically donated. When a parish leader criticized him behind his back for accepting the small stipend and his friends failed to defend him at his most vulnerable, it cut him deeply. And so he quietly left his community where he gave the best of himself. Where he knew the dignity of being needed. For his remaining years, he withdrew from his friends, his family, and God. He questioned the value of his entire life’s journey. 

 

During his hospital stays for the cancer, my Mother would faithfully bring along this small statue of a Korean Madonna and Child and set it on a doily. He’d bitterly rebuff her saying “Why are you bothering with that?” when what he really meant was “Why are you bothering with God?” But as the cancer progressed and the end drew near, he’d humbly ask her to turn the statue a bit more so he could see Mary from just the right angle. His anger at himself and at God, his hardness of heart, was cracking open to a deeper poverty of spirit. 

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He’d bitterly rebuff her saying “Why are you bothering with that?” when what he really meant was “Why are you bothering with God?”

 

When he was dying, my Mother kept him on the ventilator so I could make the trip down to see him. Half-sedated and choking, he grabbed me by the shirt collar and pulled me close. He couldn't speak but his eyes locked with mine and pleaded, “Forgive me. I have wasted so much time. Please, be with me. There is no one else.” Then he looked up from his desperation and gazed peacefully up to Heaven for a time. I felt the presence of Christ and his Mother carrying him as he passed on. 

 

A few years later I was at Mass at the Basilica of St. Josaphat in Milwaukee, this grand temple built by Polish immigrants. As I received communion and turned from the line, I had a vision of Our Lord’s crucified face locking eyes with mine, choking on his breath: “Please. Be with me. There is no one else.” I knew that look. In that instant, the memory of my Father’s pain in life and death synced with an experience of the Lord’s abandonment. I could grasp in my being what I knew intellectually, that the Eucharist cracks open our present time again and again to that same one Sacrifice of the Cross. I now believe that Christ appeared to my Father at the end, asking him to be with him in his Passion like the Good Thief. And what saved him wasn’t so much that he needed the Lord. It’s that the Lord needed him. 

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I could grasp in my being what I knew intellectually, that the Eucharist cracks open our present time again and again to that same one Sacrifice of the Cross.

 

Soon after, a vision of my Father came to me in my sleep. His face appeared as in his immigration photo but surrounded by concentric ripples of liquid gold, luminous and royal like the sound of ringing bells. It was a face that knew both deep joy and deep sorrow with a look telling me “When you get here, it’s everything you hope it is.” When he called me by my Korean name, I knew I wasn’t dreaming.