Time is a remarkable thing. It bends and warps itself into the strangest waves and patterns, some rigid and predictable, some wild and seemingly uncontained. Three decades is a drop in the sea of history, yet it’s an entire ocean when it’s the amount of time since you lost someone you loved – especially if that someone is a parent.
Thirty years ago my hometown of Amsterdam lost one of the most unique and wonderful pillars of the community – Dr. Sok Nam Ko – and a family lost its soul. He’d been sick for only a short time it seemed, and suddenly he was gone, and the shock was jarring for everyone. Suzie and I were only fifteen years old when her father died – it was a hurt and loss I couldn’t fathom, and I held my own father a little closer to my heart from that moment forward. The pain that the Ko family was enduring was terrifying to me, and I was only on the periphery. ‘Uncle Sok’ – whom I don’t ever recall addressing in such a way, but who would always be that figure for me, protecting me in ways that some of my blood uncles never could or would – the man whose spirit inhabited and dominated the Victorian home where our happiest childhood memories were forged – was no longer there, and as we walked the interminable pathway from the street to their front door on that tragic day, I didn’t want to know what it would feel like without him.
The house that had always been a source of light and love and safety and warmth was immediately different. Though the wind carried the first hints of spring on it, it felt colder than all the Christmas mornings we’d made this walk from the street to the Ko house as a family. The heart of that fire had gone out, extinguished too soon, and none of us would be the same. His wife Elaine – Suzie’s mom – and a mother to all of us in some way – greeted us at the door with hugs. I remember the feel of her dress, I think it was dark green, and she had worn it at the holidays. That already felt far away.
The kids were upstairs. My brother and I trudged slowly along the staircase up which we usually bounded in excitement. Neither of us had known death this closely – even our Grandparents in the Philippines, whom we had never met, hadn’t elicited this same fear or sorrow, with Dad holding onto his grief quietly and out of sight. They were literally half a world away – and we hadn’t spent all our birthdays and holidays with them around. Uncle Sok was someone we had grown up with – he was there when we were babies, there as we started walking, there when we were at the kids’ table for holiday dinners. And as my best friend’s father, and my father’s best friend, his loss was unimaginable.
My brother and I reached the top of the stairs and turned right into the master bedroom. I will carry the sight of the Ko kids assembled sadly in that room with me for life. Suzie was on the bed. All the faces were red and puffy from crying, stained with tears old and new, and I wondered if they would ever stop falling. Seeing Suzie like that was something I didn’t want to do. We were so young. I didn’t know how to act. There was nothing to say. I sat at the foot of the bed and pretended to watch what was on the television.
“Hey Al,” was all she said, and the happiest girl I had ever known was suddenly gone.
It was the day our carefree childhood ended. Never again would we feel complete. Never again would we be whole. Forever after that moment something would be missing – something we once had and didn’t even realize – and instantly the world shifted.
In all my years of knowing Dr. Ko, I never once told him I loved him. He wasn’t that kind of guy, and I wasn’t that kind of boy. But my way of showing love was as quiet as his: it is in remembering those that mean the most to me, and holding onto them in my heart. He’s been present here always, in the thirty years since he physically departed, whenever he comes up in a conversation with Suzie, whenever we pause in holiday revelries, whenever I see a boat, or an awkward old man’s outfit, or anyone doing something remarkable or out of the ordinary.
On emotionally indulgent days I’ll wonder how our lives might have played out if he’d been here all this time – what his grandchildren would think, how he might have changed or softened or stayed doggedly true to form. I’ll think of his friendship with my father, and how much more they might have shared, how many new hilarious stories they would have spun working together for just a few more years. (A couple of years after her father died, Suzie was able to look beyond her own grief and say that one of the things she felt bad about was that my Dad had no one to talk to at the holidays. That stayed with me, as I pondered this pair of immigrants who had come from Korea and the Philippines to find a better life, and who found themselves alone yet together in a tiny town in upstate New York named after a place in Europe.)
I’ll wonder what Uncle Sok would make of the world today, and then I’ll stop myself for sadness. The truth is that what we shared stopped in March of 1991, and there’s no way to change or go back or create an alternate reality in which he was still rushing around the world in his ongoing quest for knowledge and connection and meaning. Instead, I can only hang onto the fifteen years I was lucky enough to have with him, and share stories and memories of those who had even more, and carry on in the spirit of everything he did and accomplished.
