First Knot
I begin this record
to observe myself being consumed by emotion.
In 2024, I wrapped up a project.
Amid the emptiness of something having ended,
I came across a retraining program.
From a monotonous slideshow introducing jobs,
what caught my eye was “funeral director.”
Income, retirement age, stability.
Those details slid past my ears.
What mattered was the meaning of tending to the final image
that still holds a human form,
and the beginning of its return to nature.
The threshold where one is both seen off and welcomed.
I realized I had long been drawn to this profession.
My decision had only been waiting for an opening.
But I did not apply right away.
My schedule for 2024 was already full,
so I chose to finish out the year first.
As the decision was delayed,
needless worries crept in.
Could I really endure it?
Or would my own life be stained by death?
No. I would rather not imagine it in detail.
People say that what you think of daily becomes reality.
But that is only superstition, I told myself.
And in telling myself so,
I believed again that naming it superstition would make it so.
Enough. Empty the mind.
Yet the moment I tried,
the images grew sharper.
Ah.
No.
Thoughts about thoughts thickened like a swamp,
slowly swallowing me.
But when the enrollment period finally arrived,
my hesitation vanished.
I acted at once.
That is how I am.
While searching online, I happened to find a program.
Early March 2025.
At an institute not far from my home.
Surely this was some kind of sign.
With tense anticipation, I dialed the number.
I expected a low, solemn voice,
a quiet presence in keeping with the mood of the work.
Instead, a young man’s bright, gentle voice answered.
Caught off guard, I asked,
“Do… many young people attend?”
“Yes, quite a few these days.”
His reply eased my tension,
and I felt lighter at once.
It was a relief.
Perhaps what I had feared was not death itself,
but the heavy and shadowed atmosphere around it.
So I began to look not at death,
but at myself thinking of death.
Expecting the moments when I would be consumed by emotion,
this record goes on.
Second Knot
I have already faced many deaths.
Rabbits, pigs, chickens, shrimp, cockroaches, black soldier flies.
I touched their bodies, smelled them,
and observed them for long hours.
I named it grandly: an ontological inquiry,
a reflection on the boundary of life and death.
But the death of a human—
that I have never seen or touched.
To be honest, I never wanted to.
Strangely, now I feel
as if I should.
Why?
I am not sure.
I feel the pressure to put into practice
the philosophy I have built until now.
Yes. At this point, I must prove with
sensation, not only with thought,
that humans too are prey.
I must complete the final link.
Yet the decision feels not fully my own.
It is as if I am being pulled forward.
Given the course of my work so far,
this step feels inevitable,
as though it could not be avoided.
I have always said: all life is equal.
Every being, in the end,
decays and is consumed.
That is the law of the cycle.
It was my philosophy, my logic.
But even as I said it, I knew inside
that I was fragile before human death.
I wanted to make an exception for it.
Not from fear exactly,
but from a selfish attachment.
Not because humans are inherently dignified,
but because they resemble me too much.
That resemblance was unbearable.
Pigs, chickens, mealworms, cockroaches.
They were unfamiliar enough.
Their distance allowed me to keep an emotional line
and observe.
But humans resemble me too closely.
The texture of skin,
the color of fingernails,
the fine vessels beneath an eyelid.
Every detail would inevitably pierce me.
If I do not want to, I could simply refuse.
No one is forcing me.
Yet it is not that I do not want to.
Perhaps I even have wanted this.
Yes, I do.
Then why am I dragging my feet?
Maybe I fear that the philosophy I built
stands on weaker ground than I thought.
Maybe I fear to confirm it.
I want to flee.
I do not want to face it.
That is cowardice.
A coward hides backstage, beyond the lights,
covering unprocessed emotions
so that no one can see.
Too afraid, swallowing feelings down
and wrapping them in the paper of art.
I know in my head
that all life follows the same law.
The death of a human,
the death of a cockroach,
the death of moss,
even the death of E. coli—
all are held within the same cycle.
Still, to see human death
can never be the same as seeing a cockroach’s.
With such feelings,
can I truly sense and prove this philosophy?
Or is this hesitation itself
another form of escape?
Thinking and thinking,
yet doing nothing.
Would it have been better not to know?
Better never to have begun this work?
But I am already here.
And now I stand still, circling the same thoughts.
I am curious about the mechanism of my own mind.
I could simply say, “I am afraid.”
Why dress it up in such complexity?
But am I really afraid?
To avoid turning the page,
I end today’s record here.
Third Knot
February 2025.
A month before starting the funeral director training,
I was staying in Bangkok for an exhibition.
“It will help with your work on death,”
a friend suggested.
I was not eager,
but I convinced myself I should see it once.
So I visited the anatomy gallery
at the Siriraj Medical Museum.
There, human bodies had been dissected
and preserved as specimens.
It was my first time facing human death directly.
Surprisingly, I felt calm.
What unfolded before me was not fear,
but structure.
“Oh, so the cross-section of a calf looks like this.”
“This person must have died from a fractured bone.”
I simply observed and interpreted.
Perhaps that calmness was made possible
by the glass wall between the corpses and me.
It protected the exhibits,
and at the same time acted as a buffer for my emotions.
The bodies had already been treated and preserved,
frozen in time.
They were present before my eyes,
yet seemed to exist in another dimension.
I looked closely,
as if I were a surgeon,
studying the forms behind the glass.
The swollen texture of skin soaked in liquid,
the angle of bones twisted by accidents,
the position and color of altered organs.
In hindsight, my gaze was not a surgeon’s
but that of an artist captivated by images.
What struck me most
were the severed arms.
Arms immersed in formalin
stood lined up in glass jars.
That section bore a separate title:
Tattoo.
It hardly mattered
whether these were real human arms.
The space was curated
to highlight tattoos in all their forms.
Death was erased,
and only the images on skin remained.
The arms were no longer parts of humans,
but fragments of body resembling canvas.
Shells preserved not for the body itself,
but because they carried images.
And I found them beautiful.
Was that a professional habit?
No, I don’t think so.
Looking back, I have always been this way.
From childhood I would instinctively find beauty
in what was unpleasant or frightening,
and in the end,
try to love it.
As if it were a defense.
Perhaps it was this disposition
that inevitably led me here.
When I cannot escape,
I turn it into something else.
Disgust into fascination.
Fear into wonder.
Fourth Knot
A faded, rough sign,
its Gothic letters still faintly visible: Funeral Director Training Institute.
Up the narrow stairs,
a sealed iron door waited.
I, too, wore a stiff face as I grasped the cold handle,
told myself it was fine,
and stepped inside its mouth.
But soon, like prey dropped into a predator’s stomach,
I shrank and looked around in the unfamiliar setting.
Inside, mismatched furniture formed an odd harmony
in faded wood tones.
At the center of the wall hung a collection of old coins.
It seemed out of place,
yet gave balance to the colors of the room.
The ceiling bore dark stains here and there.
Funeral tools worn down by countless hands.
Above them, a lone fluorescent light floated.
Sharp. Harsh. Fluorescent.
The staff member I had spoken with on the phone
greeted me lightly.
I followed him deeper inside the building.
In the classroom,
what first caught my eye
were two stainless steel worktables
set side by side at the front.
On top lay mannequins,
tightly bound in cloth like mummies.
Forms doubly secured against movement
that was already absent.
Before that heavy stillness,
my heart dropped.
So I really will be handling corpses.
Then, drifting over that scene,
came a refined and luxurious fragrance.
I would later learn its name:
Baccarat Rouge 540.
It was the scent of a male student
who sat in front of me just before class began.
A strange dissonance surged.
In a place meant to teach death,
it was his fragrance
that made me feel the strongest sense of life.
During breaks
he would take out hand cream and apply it with ease.
When Jo Malone’s floral scent spread across the room,
I knew he was near.
My eyes measured the thickness of dust,
scanned the surfaces of the furniture.
My hand brushed the cold table,
fidgeted with the sharp corners of the new textbook.
My ears caught and lost
strange terms amid the squeak of chairs.
But my nose
followed only his scent.
The fragrance rising from his hands,
an overwhelming victory of smell.
All the other senses collapsed before it.
The scent spread outward
until it filled the room.
Among the many hands turning the funeral manuals,
the most vivid presence
was unmistakably his.
One day, when I perform the washing of the dead,
will his scent fill the room?
Will its trace
remain on the body as the last touch?
When he turned and greeted me,
my mind wavered again
at the smoothness of his face.
I think everyone felt it.
The moment he entered the classroom,
the air itself changed.
Even the instructor and other students
let slip a quiet admiration,
their voices tinged with laughter.
I wanted to sit beside him.
In this chilly classroom with its mannequins,
the air pulsed with the energy of life.
It was a scene both strange and stirring.
Fifth Knot
On the third day of training,
still awkward with one another,
we spoke during the break
about why we had chosen this path.
“It seems meaningful… I’ve wanted to try for a long time.”
“There are extra incentives, which sounds good.”
“I wanted to, but I hesitated.
Could I handle it emotionally? Would it be too frightening?”
We all nodded,
and in that honesty found small comfort.
At the same time,
I felt my own emotions were not so simple.
I went along with the mood and only said
that I had long been interested in the job.
They too could not yet share more complicated feelings,
not while we were still strangers.
I wanted to face death directly.
To see the outline of that vague fear.
No—more than that,
I wanted to see how I would be consumed by emotion.
I was more curious about my response to death
than death itself.
Would the feeling swallow me whole,
or would I accept the fear and sift through it?
In the end, this choice was an exploration of myself.
This training institute was, for me,
a kind of small residency.
Of course, this place exists to honor the departed
and to comfort grieving families.
I do not wish to harm that solemnity.
Only to record, beside it,
my own wavering between mourning and observation.
It would be far easier not to write.
But I do not want to look away.
To face these contradictions is my way.
This confession may feel strange or unsettling to some.
Still, I will continue to look at myself
as I appear before death.
Same space, same time.
We are all here to become funeral directors.
But each of us carries a different death,
a different predator within.
Sixth Knot
I learned how to make a jiot—
the undergarment placed directly on the body of the dead.
A single sheet of white tissue paper,
folded and cut by hand.
Though it is hidden beneath the shroud,
it must always be put on.
The jiot absorbs bodily fluids
so they do not stain the burial clothes.
Born from practical purpose,
yet folded neatly into the shape of undergarments once worn in life.
Somehow, it moved me.
A gesture of respect,
a way to preserve human dignity until the end.
I was drawn to the formality embedded in its design.
Even this alone felt like a work of art.
With the same paper, we also made flowers
to be placed inside the coffin.
Thin, white sheets,
so delicate that light passed through.
The texture and color spoke directly to my taste.
I wanted to make them more refined, more beautiful.
The rustling paper
was as light as a dried white chrysanthemum.
The very form of the flower seemed to carry death within it.
Naturally, I found myself adjusting the angles,
controlling the folds,
seeking a composition that heightened its sculptural beauty.
Each adjustment of a petal gave off a faint rustle.
They say that hearing
is the last sense to remain at the edge of death.
If one day I die,
my body stilled,
perhaps I will cling to this world
through sound alone.
The sound of paper being folded by someone for me.
If that small sound
were the final vibration of the world I could hear,
it might be a farewell translated into the language of paper.
One day, I want to bring this into my work.
But for now—
the angle of the petal is still not quite right.
The thought scattered,
and I returned to taking photos.
In the dark, with contours emphasized,
the flowers seemed to hold the scent of death,
and yet were beautiful.
“What are you doing? Why take so many pictures?”
A fellow student looked at me with curiosity.
Only then did I realize, embarrassed,
that I was absorbed not in the ritual for the dead,
but in the form and beauty of the flowers themselves.
Since then, whenever I fold that white paper,
I hesitate, just a little.
Seventh Knot
In the washing and dressing of the dead,
the first step is called chung-i.
In class we began with making undergarments,
but in reality, the very first act
is to press cotton deep into the nose and mouth.
Chung-i fills the sunken cheeks,
and prevents fluids from flowing outward.
It is a gesture of respect,
a procedure for the deceased and the bereaved.
Like stuffing cotton into a doll to restore its shape,
chung-i blocks the airway of the dead
while reviving the memory of breath.
A being without breath.
A body without sensation.
Each time I pushed cotton into the doll’s mouth,
my own throat tightened.
It felt less like restoration than like sealing.
Not breathing life back into a body stilled,
but pressing down even the trace of air
that once lingered inside.
It was not a beginning, but a conclusion.
Mmph.
I repeated to myself:
This is a doll.
This is a body without pain.
Eighth Knot
Again today I stood before the mannequin of the dead.
After several days, I had grown used to dressing it in tissue-paper undergarments.
But there were still things I could not get used to.
Today we learned soryeom—
adding the shroud over the paper underclothes.
The stiff fabric scraped my hands again and again.
Skin tore under my fingernails.
My brow tightened from the sting.
A faint sigh escaped—“Ah!”—though I tried to hold it in.
Yet because of that stiffness,
the folds looked neat and beautiful.
Over the mouth already packed with cotton,
it was time to cover the face.
Layer after layer:
long cotton,
paper,
linen,
mouth cover,
head cloth.
Each tied firmly with string.
This is protection.
So the departing will not feel cold.
And yet I felt suffocated.
Not the doll, but me.
My breath rose to my throat.
Cough.
Dust from the hemp cloth
pierced deep into my nose,
then burst out with a cough.
It was not only the dust.
It felt as though I were coughing in place of the doll.
Again—cough.
“Do we really need to tie the strings?
Wouldn’t it be better to leave the face uncovered?”
The words slipped from me before I knew it.
“For cremation, maybe. But not for burial.
If the bones shift, it causes problems during reburial.”
The instructor added, dry and firm:
“In this job, you do as you’re told.”
Silence followed.
I knew he was right.
Even so,
my hands were not yet accustomed
to letting someone go.
Ninth Knot
5:40 p.m.
After class, I got into my car.
Alone, as the engine started,
a surge of emotion rose beyond control.
Like meat dissolving in stomach acid,
I was swallowed by myself and wept.
Whether from the sunset piercing my pupils
or from tears,
my eyes were contorted.
I pulled down the sun visor
and cried on the stalled evening road.
Today’s class was different.
The students begged the instructor
to let us relax,
so he played the latest hit drama,
When Life Gives You Tangerines.
A story designed to shake emotions.
At every scene of weeping, breaking, embracing,
sniffles spilled through the room.
Everyone cried.
Even the instructor wiped his eyes beside us.
Only I did not.
In the damp air thick with tears,
I stared ahead with dry eyes.
While others fixed on the screen,
I focused on something behind me,
on a warmth I could not see.
Two people pressed close,
building a small greenhouse of their own.
I felt it for hours.
It was too faint to call jealousy,
too vast to call loneliness.
I felt I was the only one cold.
In that dreary, worn classroom,
a familiar floral scent.
Spring was blooming behind my back alone.
Beside the projected screen,
the mannequins lay on their steel tables.
They entered my vision too.
I sat alone in a frozen space,
my heart like a mortuary kept at four degrees.
On screen, Aesoon had nothing but love.
Her husband looked only at her,
pure devotion.
Though poor, their home was warm with embrace.
But I could not feel it.
Not that my emotions had cooled,
but that they had never stirred.
Their tears were alive.
I was quietly dead.
So within the tears of others
I became more completely isolated.
Outside the window,
the warm spring sunset poured down.
It did not comfort me.
It only thawed, for a moment,
my frozen feelings.
And I knew.
All of this was part of a larger story,
prepared long ago.
I was not sure.
Did I like him?
Or did I like the feeling of being drawn to someone?
Was it not the man,
but the scent he carried?
A trick of jealousy?
Or only a wish
to dress my barren landscape with love?
The road grew calm again.
I wiped my tear-streaked face
with the back of my hand.
Still, the sunlight beyond the window
shone indifferently,
like the lamp above an operating table.
Every day I dissect death,
yet I cannot dissect
the feelings of the living.
Only the sunlight
observed this bodily reflex of crying
and stopping.
Tenth Knot
April 1st.
April Fool’s Day.
We needed something lighthearted.
The eldest in our class volunteered to play the role of the body.
She lay down on the platform,
and the room filled with laughter.
The youngest took the lead, I was the assistant.
As I prepared the shroud, I instinctively reached for my camera.
Before and after, step one, step two, framed in sequence.
As I always did.
Like photographing expenses for proof of fund use,
my body arranged the shots automatically.
“Before photo first.”
She closed her eyes to play the deceased.
Just as I pressed the shutter, she broke into a smile.
I returned to my place as assistant,
ready to lift her body into the jacket.
But it would not move.
The mannequins could be carried with one hand.
A real person was different.
The soft flesh. The heavy weight.
I pulled and pushed with all my strength
to fit her body into the garment.
Clothed in the rough shroud,
tied from head to toe with rope,
she lay there.
I photographed her from many angles,
including close-ups.
“Share it in the group chat. I’ll show my daughter.”
She laughed.
I answered, “Of course.”
But my finger paused on the shutter.
Her face on the screen looked suddenly unfamiliar.
Lying there in a shroud,
it felt like an image that would one day be real.
What would her daughter feel,
seeing such a photo?
If my mother sent me the same image,
would I laugh?
It was a face I would one day meet again.
A frozen expression.
Would today’s scene come back to me then?
It was April Fool’s Day.
So we laughed, and we took photos.
We were handling death,
but no one spoke of it seriously.
A person lay down instead of a mannequin.
The shroud was tied on like a joke.
And yet, in some distant future,
someone might still take out this photo
with the hope that it would remain only a joke.
I hope they remember, then,
that it was April Fool’s Day.
We practiced death every day.
But in the face of an actual farewell,
we would remain novices.
Even after a long, long time,
may this laughter remain only laughter.
Eleventh Knot
The training moved on to the royal-style daeryeom.
After soryeom, the body was laid on the mat called jigeum.
Over it came the blanket cheongeum,
then the pillow geumchim.
My partner and I lifted the large cloth jangmae together,
folding it over to secure the mannequin’s body.
Then came twenty-one knots.
Left hand holding, right hand wrapping.
One, two, three, four…
My hands moved quickly.
“Time check!”
The instructor’s voice cut in.
I glanced at the clock. Still fine.
Over the knots, several layers of ornate cone-shaped decorations.
My focus wavered for a moment.
As I arranged the cones,
I thought the swelling, dulling form beneath
looked like a sculpture in reverse.
As if returning to a state of possibility.
Fingers, jawline, the swell and hollow of the chest—
all once sharp presences—
smoothed into a flat surface.
Head, arms, legs all covered.
Only a long shape with vivid patterns remained.
“Next, encoffinment!”
The instructor’s command snapped me back.
We opened the coffin, laid the mannequin inside.
Added flowers.
Tied the coffin shut with cords.
Done.
Completion within the hour.
At the time, there was no room for thought.
But lying in bed now,
I realize every movement in the classroom
was not mere procedure.
I sensed deeper meaning
in the layered knots and the repetition of hands.
At first it looked like nothing more
than excessive steps and decoration.
But within it was sorrow pressed down in silence.
Perhaps these rites are not for the dead at all,
but for the living,
unable to bear the chaos and fear before death.
A desperate effort
to keep both mind and senses occupied.
To push sorrow aside, if only briefly.
Of course, some will see it
as rites for the spirit of the deceased.
I always structure my feelings.
So that fear does not erupt all at once,
I divide, press down, bind, repeat.
Perhaps that is why
the repetitive wrapping of daeryeom
felt so close to my sculptural language.
Tomorrow, when I return to the training hall,
I will again
enshroud,
bind,
adorn.
Faster.
More precise.
Twelfth Knot
Toward the end of class,
we had grown fairly familiar with the motions of the burial wash.
Almost every day, we draped the shroud over the mannequin,
folded the hands and feet,
and practiced the rhythm of arranging death.
Today, warm sunlight streamed in through the window.
Beneath it,
our eldest classmate, the head student,
hummed softly as she spread the shroud over the mannequin.
The cloth settled smoothly,
like a tablecloth laid flat after ironing.
Her hands moved gently,
as if tending to some small chore at home.
Now that I think of it,
her humming had been present for some time.
It was so natural
that it passed without notice.
But today, suddenly,
the clear notes struck my ear,
set in sharp contrast to the funeral terms
the instructor was reciting.
On the first day, she said
she had been afraid even to stand before the mannequin.
But now,
with the sun at her back,
she hummed lightly,
her hands moving in rhythm,
a faint smile on her face.
It was a curious scene.
Life and death held together in a single frame.
Without thinking, I exclaimed:
“Oh! You’re humming!”
That surreal harmony—
death, sunlight, hands, and a hum.
The words escaped as simple wonder.
She startled, then said, a little embarrassed,
“Oh dear, Jae-eun… I really ought to break the habit.
I wouldn’t do this at a real site…”
I waved it off with a smile.
“No, it’s just that the scene was so beautiful.”
Sunlight soaked into the shroud as well.
And the hum,
even in the landscape of death,
may have been nothing more
than a reflex of the living body.
Thirteenth Knot
I opened my wardrobe and pulled out a black dress,
as if going to a funeral.
A garment of farewell,
and at the same time,
a garment marking the beginning of my life as a funeral director.
The training institute called.
“Today is the last class. Aren’t you coming?”
I only replied, “I’ll be there soon.”
Like a white cloth covering the deceased,
I spread smooth cream over a cake
and fixed candles shaped in the number 18,
our class number.
I smiled to myself.
Today was the final class.
As I wrote postcards to classmates and instructors,
I retraced the days behind us:
the bulgogi kimbap I had prepared the night before,
the homemade cookies baked at dawn,
the inari sushi made after cutting short my sleep,
the outings for seolleongtang and noodles,
the coffee exchanged as gifts.
Together we had endured a vague fear,
hiding small kindnesses in food and offering them to one another.
Perhaps it was because I was writing postcards,
but only the pleasant scenes came to mind.
Or perhaps it was simply the last day
that sharpened such feelings.
Why is it that emotions always grow stronger
at the end?
When I arrived,
everyone was already in black suits.
“You’re late—this is our last day.”
I said nothing,
only smiled quietly.
The cake was still a surprise.
Class ended sooner than expected.
Then, as planned, we held a modest farewell party.
The manuals of funeral etiquette were pushed aside.
In their place:
jjamppong, jjolmyeon, tangsuyuk, yangjangpi, jokbal.
We exchanged trivial jokes,
smiled at one another.
When our stomachs were full,
I brought out the hidden cake.
“I was late because I went to buy this.”
Then I handed out the postcards,
written through the night.
“…I still remember that day when tears broke out so suddenly.
When we worked in step to dress the mannequin in a shroud.
When you helped so kindly to put everything in order.
I will remember those moments.”
In black clothes,
we gathered around the white cake,
smiling playfully as we posed for a photo.
It was warm,
as most endings are.
Just yesterday we had still felt awkward,
but the words “last class” made everything tender.
This abrupt shift in feeling—
sincere, yet somehow staged.
It was like the end of a play,
when actors who quarreled on stage
all step forward with gentle faces
to bow together.
Our emotions may have been no more than
a temporary illusion staged by the word “last.”
Perhaps I was the only one
assigning meaning,
the only one moved.
I am always swayed by the word “last,”
giving my heart away as if under a spell.
Theatrical beginning and end
seemed to be watched silently
by the two mannequins still lying in the classroom.
And soon,
they would watch the next cohort’s play as well,
unchanged.
Fourteenth Knot
Now, having finished the funeral director training course,
I sit alone again in my room at home.
The air is empty, without scent.
Just yesterday, at the same time,
in the same place, with the same faces—
I liked, expected, resented,
as if we would keep meeting.
I thought those feelings would last.
But today,
the first morning without the institute,
everything broke off—snap.
The laughter in the classroom,
the chatter at lunch,
all shifted in a moment to silence.
What happened only a day ago
already feels distant,
like a memory from years past,
like a scene expelled from a dream.
Excitement, regret, sorrow—
all flipped in an instant into emptiness.
The feelings no longer gnaw at me.
The jaw of emotion has stopped.
I am free.
And yet, in place of the rhythm once chewing me,
a larger vacancy remains.
This break is not new.
At graduation,
at retirement,
at the end of a residency—
all long-held rhythms
eventually end
with a sudden snap.
I have always endured
this strange and hollow rupture.
It never feels familiar.
Yet soon,
the quiet itself becomes familiar.
Even when someone lies long in bed
and farewells are prepared with care,
still, one day,
at an unforeseen moment—
snap.
Preparation changes nothing.
Loss is always abrupt,
uncannily quiet,
and irreversibly complete.
Snap.
Fifteenth Knot
The final step to becoming a funeral director
is field training at a funeral hall.
Only when someone dies,
and a schedule is set,
can I enter that space.
Like microbes curled in a dark intestine,
released only when the host ceases to breathe,
I, too, am held in a fated state of waiting—
able to move only when death calls.
For days now, no summons.
Because no one has died.
Spring has erupted into bloom.
They say many pass away in this season of change,
but the funeral halls where I am meant to go remain quiet.
That death is rare is fortunate.
And yet I feel regret
for not having the chance to experience it.
This paradox creaks
like a twisted chair.
So I sit uneasily,
fidgeting with my phone,
waiting for someone’s death.
And I record this moment.
Sixteenth Knot
This morning, after days of silence, my phone rang.
At last, a call from the funeral hall.
“If you can come this afternoon, we’re ready.”
I had just been about to go out for a spring outing.
It seemed there would be nothing today.
The rain that fell all day yesterday had stopped,
and spring air poured in through the open window.
I felt good.
Even knowing the nature of the work I was about to do,
I could not stop it.
A strange gladness,
that the awaited event had finally arrived.
Like a prey in the predator’s mouth—
caught for a moment in the throat
before sliding down with a sip of spring rain,
relieved to be swallowed at last.
I took off my yellow sweater
and changed into a black shirt.
If the practicum had begun immediately
after the course ended,
I might not have felt this way.
Those slow days,
when nothing happened,
let worry accumulate,
drawing my feelings into a peculiar curve.
Perhaps it is a biological response.
Amid signals that reason cannot explain,
I sense myself wobbling on the edge of nature,
trying to keep balance.
So now, before setting out,
I take a moment to write this down,
lest the feeling scatter away.
My heart pounds.
I press my lips to hide a smile,
like organic matter waiting to ferment.
I wonder.
Tonight, after my first washing of the dead,
will I still be smiling?
Seventeenth Knot
By the time I arrived at the funeral hall, the washing and dressing had already begun.
I put on a white gown, fixing a neutral expression to my face.
It was the same gown I had worn eight years ago,
during the work Angela’s Research Institute Corporation.
Looking back, I realize I am not the same person I was then.
The playful irreverence with which I once treated life
has since quieted into a readiness to handle death.
“Authorized Personnel Only.”
What scene would I face when I opened that door?
I straightened my gown once more,
and pulled the handle.
Under fluorescent light, the deceased’s body was cast in a cold glow.
Other trainees who had arrived earlier were already assisting.
The funeral director leading the ritual
was adjusting the sunken corners of the mouth.
My eyes wandered, scanning the room.
A smell.
Cosmetics, alcohol, must, and the body’s own odor
mingled and filled the space.
I stood quietly in the corner, letting the strangeness settle in.
A few minutes later, I stepped closer
and looked carefully at the face of the deceased.
I was not afraid.
To my surprise, I felt a kind of familiarity.
Not a corpse, but a grandfather lying in rest.
An ordinary face I might have seen in passing somewhere.
Through the slightly open left eyelid
floated a blurred, unfocused eye,
yet the face itself was too familiar to seem like death.
I had vaguely expected to encounter
a face utterly different from the living.
A face so frightening I could not even imagine it.
The memory of Bangkok returned—
the first time I had confronted death.
Bodies preserved in formalin, behind glass.
They remained suspended, unable to reach me.
But here there was no glass, no solution.
And still, strangely, I felt no fear.
It was as if the invisible wall
that had long stood between me and death
was quietly dissolving.
Except for one thing.
The color of the lips.
As if dipped in black ink.
The sensation was not “dead” but “wrong.”
A shade the human mouth could never produce.
Like a misprint.
I was not afraid of it—
only unsettled.
To help straighten the shroud,
I stepped closer and lifted the deceased’s ankles.
Cold.
The chill of the morgue seeped through the cloth
and into my fingertips.
The flesh somewhere between soft and slack.
As I wiped away the yellowish, reddish fluid
that had flowed from the mouth,
the eyedropper tool in Photoshop flashed to mind.
What would be the CMYK code of this secretion?
Its complementary color—perhaps a fresh mint green?
When all was finished, it was time to invite the family in.
As first-time trainees,
we withdrew to the adjoining room
and watched through a large glass window.
The door opened, and those who resembled the deceased entered.
Some with rigid faces,
some with cries,
some swallowing tears as they faced the final moment.
The frame of the glass was not a cinema screen.
It was solid, weighty reality.
Family members embraced the grandfather, weeping, repeating:
“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry…”
The funeral director waited, then gave the signal.
“We will now cover his face.”
At once the sobs rose into wails.
Watching, my own eyes brimmed with tears,
ready to spill—
when a fellow trainee beside me whispered:
“What was that called again?”
He pointed to the hemp cloth covering the deceased’s face.
In that moment the tears receded,
and from somewhere in my frontal lobe
the precise word surfaced, smooth and exact.
I said.
“Myeonmok.”
Eighteenth Knot
The door of the mortuary refrigerator opened.
Wrapped in a hospital-branded sheet,
the deceased’s outline was blurred—
shoulder and leg indistinct.
Who might this be?
Most arrive here shrouded in white cloth.
Every day, the funeral director opens a new wrapping
to face an unpredictable face.
There is no time to grow accustomed;
the encounters are always new.
We drew out the tray and set it on the table.
For a moment, the deceased was placed back
into the air of the living.
As the sheet was drawn away,
skin slowly emerged.
Before the face was uncovered,
I held my breath.
One, two, three.
The face appeared suddenly,
two hand spans from my eyes.
Again, disarmingly familiar.
A face one might simply call “uncle.”
My supervisor said the joints should be massaged,
to ease the stiffness.
My chest quickened.
At last, death itself would touch my bare hands.
And then—guilt.
This fascination was unworthy,
as if I were handling the deceased as an object.
A rush of allure and reproach all at once.
“Please, to the left,” my supervisor said.
I followed, slowly rotating the left arm,
carefully pressing each finger,
loosening the rigid hand.
The fingers softened,
and for a moment it felt as though
the hand itself had clasped mine.
Perhaps I had pressed the flexor muscles just so.
Images from anatomy lectures flashed and vanished.
The deceased’s left hand and my right hand—joined.
As though gripping the hand of an old friend,
yet one I had only just met,
and no longer among the living.
Cold and warmth overlapped,
equalized to a single temperature.
The mingled scents of disinfectant alcohol and hand cream
rose between our clasped hands,
striking deeper layers of my senses.
In that way, I shared
a first and final warmth with the deceased.
One day, I too will be touched
by the hand of a stranger,
and briefly share a last warmth
before departure.
37.5 degrees.
As I lingered in thought,
a family member entered.
Before the shrouding began,
they asked to see the deceased once more.
They touched the not-yet-cleansed face,
held it close,
and whispered:
“I love you.”
Every deceased is infinitely beloved to someone.
To some, a frightening corpse;
to others, nothing but love.
After they left,
I wiped the eyes, the mouth, the neck
again and again with alcohol pads.
Gazing so long at the face,
I found myself imagining
the expressions it once held.
Strangely, I felt a kind of affection.
Or perhaps my emotions, straining to endure,
had only created an illusion.
Setting that aside,
we brought in the family.
Faces resembling the deceased entered one by one.
“I’m so sorry.
I’m so sorry.
I’m so sorry.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.”
Among them, a young woman most resembling the deceased
stood before him, expressionless,
and gazed for a long time without a word
into his equally expressionless face.
Between the suppressed face and the slackened face
lay life and death.
The face of the deceased was not sorrowful.
Sorrow belonged outside the face,
to those still living.
In time, within the warmth of family,
the coffin lid closed quietly.
The deceased returned once more
to the suspended time of the mortuary,
carrying with him the warmth of the world he had loved.
Nineteenth Knot
Today the procedure was longer than usual.
Every step—laying the mat and blanket, wrapping the jangmae, tying the hemp cloth—
had to be performed in front of the family.
It was a high-tier funeral package.
Golden crests gleamed on the conical headpiece,
phoenixes and peonies embroidered into the fine hemp shroud.
After closing the eyes
and shaving away the final traces of life from the face,
we invited the family into the preparation room.
Tears broke out at once.
One after another, relatives embraced the body,
offering final farewells.
Even as the wailing grew louder,
I focused on measured movements,
wrapping the face with cotton,
layering hemp cloth upon hemp cloth.
With each layer added,
the cries gradually softened.
Unlike the stifling rehearsal with mannequins at the academy,
this was steadying—
a gesture that seemed to enfold the emotions of the bereaved
as much as the body of the deceased.
The broad hemp band was tied across the body.
Before long, the family’s eyes were drawn
to the rhythm of my supervisor’s hands
knotting the cord.
When my supervisor asked me to finish the knots—
to form the flowers—
all eyes turned to my hands.
I moved deliberately,
in keeping with the solemnity of the high-grade rite.
On the surface I looked professional,
yet inside I stirred like someone stepping onto a stage.
The thrill was absurd, perhaps,
but I had always been the “ace” of hemp-knot flowers.
Like an adult flattered over a childhood art project,
I felt a hidden surge of pride,
secretly savoring it.
My face, of course, remained neutral.
Even the mourners seemed to set aside grief for a moment,
absorbed by the scene my hands were shaping.
Suppressing the energy rising within me,
I carried out the gestures as though consecrated,
gathering the long strands, twisting them into curves,
aligning the angle of my wrist with each turn.
Seven small hemp flowers bloomed.
Then the lid was opened.
It was time to place the deceased into the coffin.
“Coffining,” my supervisor announced.
The sobs surged again,
the same sound I had heard days earlier
when nephews wailed over an unclaimed death.
Neither gold crests nor embroidered shrouds
changed the weight of grief.
After thirty minutes, the viewing ended.
The family left slowly,
and the room fell quickly into silence.
In the stillness,
a single fly buzzed through the preparation room.
A colleague trapped it swiftly in his palm.
Something alive,
faintly writhing within his hand.
As I went to fetch tissue,
I overheard the staff member murmur:
“Here, if you kill a fly or a spider,
a new body will arrive that day.
So kill it.
Otherwise, we won’t survive either.”
It sounded like a joke—
or a prayer.
I handed him the tissue.
The fly was lightly crushed.
I watched quietly
as its final twitch subsided.
Twentieth Knot
“O, spirit of the forest…”
Lips offering solemn prayer
hid the sharp fangs of a wolf.
In a small school deep in the woods,
a wolf, a cat, a zebra—
many animals studied together.
Among them was a quiet rabbit.
The rabbit often fell behind,
but was diligent, always the first to greet,
kind to everyone.
During leaf-sweeping,
the rabbit knocked loose a part of the mole’s wall.
The mole was upset,
but no one was hurt, and it was soon repaired.
The wolf, as if waiting for the moment, smiled:
“You’ll find it hard to live in this forest now.
Everyone will hate you.”
It sounded like a joke,
but carried a chill of warning.
The wolf readily spoke as if he were the mole,
taking the victim’s voice,
narrowing the rabbit’s place bit by bit.
Rumors spread, mistakes swelled,
and soon the words went around:
“Stay away from the rabbit—trouble will follow.”
As foretold, the rabbit was pushed out.
The wolf had done it before.
Even when a question was confusing for anyone,
if asked again by someone he disliked,
he would bare his fangs in front of all:
“I already told you that!”
Turning the other into the one who spoiled the mood.
The deer and the bear sometimes nodded in agreement.
Many had once received sweet berries from the wolf,
or been spared a bothersome chore.
The wolf was witty, passionate.
Even as he mocked and expelled the rabbit,
many still liked him.
In time, the rabbit was no longer seen.
The forest, strangely, grew calm.
Ironically,
with the rabbit gone,
the wolf still prayed solemnly before the spirit of the forest—
with the same lips that, days earlier,
had given me flowers with a gentle smile.
One day, the wolf said quietly to me,
“You see, it was all for our forest.
I will keep protecting it.”
His voice was strangely kind, yet firm.
But soon after,
the wolf left the forest as well.
He said he had always been a child of the sea,
that he longed for the ocean.
He left a letter with cheerful drawings:
“It was fun to be together.
Take care, everyone.”
From the top of an old tree,
I sat and watched,
bloodless, tearless,
as though only recording.
That was all.
A mouth that begins in prayer, ends in predation.
Claws that begin in silence, end in record.
Hoo.
Twenty-First Knot
I thought I was expressionless.
I was the only one who believed it.
Today, after completing my practicum at the funeral hall,
my classmates spoke carefully over lunch.
“Jae-eun, on the first day your eyes were shining.”
“You looked so excited.”
At once, past remarks came back.
I had heard them before.
“Why are you smiling, artist?”
Words that always wrapped me in cuteness or delight.
But those moments were rarely cute,
rarely beautiful.
When looking at a dead pig,
when preparing food for cockroaches,
when staring at maggots feeding on scraps—
I must have been smiling then too,
my eyes bright, without knowing.
Once, half joking, half serious,
I even confessed to a fellow artist:
“I worry I smile too much.”
I thought I was blank,
but my emotions had already been drawing expressions.
So where exactly did the smile break through?
A subtle pleasure that seeped in with immersion.
I wanted to isolate the circuit,
the precise conditions under which my eyes lit up.
Was it every maggot?
Every carcass?
Wait—
it wasn’t that I liked maggots,
but that I was startled to find them… adorable.
I was not looking at the object itself.
I was fascinated by the way my emotions
shifted in directions I had not anticipated.
When prejudice collapsed and suddenly
the question rose—What is this?—
my mouth was already curling upward.
Novelty and strangeness pressed in together,
dopamine bursting through the system of “me.”
In the preparation room, my expression
was not a smile toward the deceased,
but a reflex to my own emotions.
The moment I realized how stably they flowed,
contrary to what I expected,
I surprised myself,
and it escaped as a faint smile.
Perhaps a closed circuit of recognition.
I am still recording,
still analyzing the pathways that move a face.
And even now, I am probably expressionless.
But then I realize—
my record has never been
a direct gaze into death.
My eyes strayed down side paths:
the CMYK codes of bodily fluids,
the textures of funeral paper flowers.
Through stray thoughts, odd fancies, aesthetic indulgence,
I unconsciously built a buffer
between myself and reality.
That is why I could believe
I was smiling with bright eyes,
or that I was blank.
Because I had stepped back
just before being swallowed.
My mind stayed clear,
my hands steady on the page.
But it was an illusion.
I was already inside the esophagus—
not of emotion, but of thought.
That single step back,
that relentless observation of myself,
was the very jaw and teeth.
The more I studied and defined myself,
the deeper the predator burrowed within me.
In rewriting these notes hundreds of times,
I have been chewed endlessly.
And I probably still am.