A month ago, I said goodbye to my mother. I had sensed it, somewhere in the back of my mind, but I hadn’t realized how deeply it would consume me. It was the greatest grief I have ever known. This was not simply parting. It was losing someone you love, forever. I now have to accept, as reality, that my mother has become bone and ash.

This kind of absolute farewell is something we are all destined to face, simply by being born human. For me, it came a little earlier than expected. It is something everyone goes through. I kept telling myself that, placing my grief within the wider flow of time, so that I would not drown in it.

Two days before my scheduled departure, I canceled my flight to Germany. It was the third day since my mother had been admitted to the ICU. From that point until she passed, I wrote with everything I had for two months. It was a desperate attempt to hold on to reason. In my diary, I poured out my fear and grief as they surged in real time. They became the most urgent twenty pages I have ever written. On an anonymous blog, I recorded her condition in detail. We tried every treatment available to her. As I tried to understand what was happening inside her lungs, I clung to prayer and hope, like dew trembling at the tip of a blade of grass.

It was a suspended state. Neither gone nor still here. At times, I felt like a traveler waiting in a sealed airport, listening for the moment the lockdown would be lifted. After a month, there was still no improvement. After speaking with my family, I decided to return to Germany to put the basics of life back in place, with the understanding that I would come back immediately if anything changed.

About a month later, just as I was beginning to settle again, my father called at 4 a.m., Korean time. I booked a flight for the very next day, my heart already cold with what I feared. From Regensburg to Munich, from Incheon to Busan, and then straight to the ICU. I saw my mother again. At 11 p.m., we were allowed a final visit. It was a devastating night.

The days that followed passed in uncertainty, never knowing when the next call would come. The time difference blurred everything further. It felt as though I were standing still on a tidal flat, watching her drift farther and farther away with the rising tide.

As we gathered through her final hours, I began a new series of photo collages. Once again, art held together what had been torn apart inside me. I arranged symbols, immersing myself in the work, as if something inside me were slowly being released. I hoped that what we had shared would continue to shimmer, and that her soul would rise freely into the sky. My mother, a woman of deep faith, was laid to rest within a beautiful funeral mass.

I had to let her go without ever having a proper final conversation. I prayed that if there were words left unspoken, she might come to me in a dream. But I have not seen her yet. I imagine her now, reunited with my grandmother, finally eating all the food she had once been unable to eat, living in peace.

As I continue living, I feel more and more that a part of her remains within me. So instead of drifting through life, I want to move steadily toward the life I long for. Just as she prayed the rosary every nine days for forty-five years, I want to carry that same quiet constancy into my own life.

And perhaps, one day, she will come to me in a dream and say, “You’re doing well, my daughter.”