[Opinion] Missing Loved Ones

`I want to love you now/more than before/but you are not here. I am climbing the rope of love/to find you up there in heaven…..I now understand/what love is,` An 80-year-old poet, Kim Chun-soo wrote `Sad Love Song` as he missed dearly his late wife who passed away last year. Left alone without the companion for several years, he keeps writing about the solitude through such line as `My skin wants to be touched by yours` to be born again like he once wrote `You gave new birth to yourself.`

▷One of the most stressful situations we face throughout life is the death of a husband or wife. And experts say it is even harder for men to let their wives go than for women to let their men go. Although there is saying `a man smiles twice at his wife`s funeral,` the fact is that it is not easy for old men to live without their companions of life whom they were heavily dependent on. Pop singer Cho Yong-pil, who just went through the pain of letting his wife go, said that he would spend his wife`s fortune helping children suffering from heart diseases as his wife did. His late wife, in fact, wanted her money to be used for Cho`s life-long dream of establishing a music school. The news touched our hearts as Cho said his wife in heaven would understand the change of the plan. It was like watching O Henry`s `Christmas Carole` and the movie `Ghost` together.

▷As it was reflected in the latest news, Cho and late Ann Jin-yun had had a perfectly mutually complementary relationship. If Cho had been a tree, Ahn would have been soil. When Cho said ˝For me, music comes first and then family,˝ Ahn was willing to serve as his manager, ˝He hardly knows about business since he knows nothing but music.˝ Cho once said during an Interview with a monthly magazine in 1997, ˝I will be totally dependent on my wife when I become an old man. ˝ But Ahn could not wait for him that long. Cho remembers that he felt so happy when his sick wife ate a seaweed soup he prepared.

▷There is something Cho can do now. During the interview 6 years ago, he said that he ˝wanted to write a song for wives on behalf of all the men in the world just as Rod Stewart wrote a song for his wife.˝ And now is time to make a beautiful song out of his grief. We hope to hear him sing one of the most beautiful songs for wife that could equal to poet Kim`s dedication to his wife.

Kim Sun-deok, Editorial Writer, yuri@donga.com