[Bread-Baking Typewriter] Courage to Let You Go, Perhaps the Courage to Live On

A Mother Who Lost Her Daughter to Mental Illness
"Mourning is not a door that closes with tears,
but a window that must be opened every day"
A Record of Survival, Not Just of Loss

"That day, you left for the place you had longed for. I was left behind in a world without you. (Omitted) We could not ask each other anything. Every word lost its voice, circling in our throats before disappearing. Instead, we beat each other's backs and wailed like animals. My stomach hurt so much it felt like it would burst. A pain like labor. On the day I lost you, that pain returned once again."

[Bread-Baking Typewriter] Courage to Let You Go, Perhaps the Courage to Live On

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Courage to Let You Go tells the story of a mother who lost her seventeen-year-old daughter to mental illness. Unlike the words widow, widower, or orphan, there is no term for this kind of loss; parents who lose a child are left without even a name. The author does not write to organize her pain, but to survive within it. This book is a record of those unbearably sorrowful and anguished days.

On average, 36.1 people end their own lives each day in Korea. With a suicide rate of 28.3 per 100,000 people, Korea ranks first among OECD countries. However, these numbers cannot fully capture the stories of those left behind. The death of one person can completely upend the lives of as few as six or as many as twenty people. Research also shows that the suicide rate among those bereaved by suicide is twenty times higher than that of the general population.

Courage to Let You Go does not follow the typical narrative of overcoming grief among suicide survivors, but instead shows how to coexist with loss. The author writes, "Mourning is not a door that closes with tears, but a window that must be opened every day," and she chooses, day by day, to resent a little less and to live a little more. She connects with others who have experienced the same pain, resumes her studies that had come to a halt, and slowly rebuilds the time that had collapsed. For the author, writing is both healing and action. Though sorrow does not disappear, the underlying faith in a faint light within the darkness permeates her words.

The author's confession reaches beyond despair to address society as a whole. The question is not "Why didn't we know?" but "Why is it a structure that makes us unable to see?" The reality of waiting months for a psychiatric appointment, waiting rooms filled with children in school uniforms, and the voices of parents saying, "I never thought my child would do that," all reveal the true face of our society. She says: Even when raised with love, a child may still leave. Perhaps that is true. The author painfully reminds us that youth suicide is not just a family tragedy, but a structural failure of society as a whole.

The author shifts her gaze from the past to the present. More than 100,000 children under the age of ten have received psychiatric treatment, and the youth suicide rate continues to reach record highs every year. "For the children of this land, life was a survival game where being pushed out meant their very existence was denied." Perhaps this sentence is both a desperate plea and an appeal. She urges us not to dismiss the suffering of children as a personal issue and to acknowledge that neither adults nor society were prepared to reach out to them when needed.

The author asks, "If we must cover happiness in order to erase pain, what then can fill our lives?" She remembers the seventeen years of raising her daughter as "a time like a gift." What remains in the place of loss is not regret, but love. "Time ultimately takes all lives to their end. At that end, emptiness awaits, but love continues beyond it."

Courage to Let You Go, both a record of despair and a social question, exposes the silence and prejudice imposed on those bereaved by suicide.

Living while carrying loss is a sorrow that can never truly be resolved. To all who must go on living after losing a loved one, the author says: "Grief does not end. But love continues beyond it. And that love is our courage to live."

Courage to Let You Go is the story of one mother, but also the story of our entire society. It shows that one person's pain can become our own, and that some pain can lead to even greater love. This book contains a voice that only those who have endured can produce-language that blooms at the edge of loss. And that voice, even today, holds on desperately to someone's life.