It was when I was in middle school. One day, a casual remark from my friend Gwanjin touched my heart. “Ojung, I miss my mom so much. But… I can’t really remember where her grave is. I went there once when I was little and haven’t been back since.”
My friend, who had lost his mother early, spoke with a trembling voice, and I had no reason to hesitate. I tightly tied my sneakers and said, “Hey, let’s go! I’ll help you find it.”
Based solely on Gwanjin’s faint memory, we went to a cemetery in Anyang. The endless rows of graves stretching along the mountain ridge were too vast and daunting for two middle schoolers to handle. It was a time without mobile phones or the internet. The only clue we had was my friend’s mother’s three-character name. We began traversing between the graves like an expedition team searching for lost treasure, running our hands over the names engraved on each headstone.
“Is this her?” “No, the surname is different.” “What about here?” “The year doesn’t match.” We repeatedly stopped and moved our steps in front of hundreds of headstones. Sweat formed on our foreheads, and our knees stung and itched from plant poison, but we didn’t give up.
Before long, the sun had dipped beyond the western mountains, and a bluish darkness began to settle over the mountain. In the end, we couldn’t find my friend’s mother’s grave. As we descended the mountain empty-handed, Gwanjin’s back appeared lonelier than the setting sun. Unable to bear the sight of his slumped shoulders, I stopped in front of a mound.
“Gwanjin, let’s bow here. Even if this isn’t the right place, your heartfelt longing will surely reach your mother in heaven. She’ll know you came this far.”
We knelt reverently in front of an unnamed grave and respectfully bowed. Though the address might have been wrong, I believed that my friend’s heartfelt longing for his mother and the comfort I wanted to offer must have reached somewhere in the heavens. Gwanjin finally seemed a bit relieved, wiping away the tears from his eyes and faintly smiling.
The next day, Gwanjin laughed and said, “Hey! It wasn’t there!” When we checked at home, the mountain we had wandered all day turned out to be completely unrelated to where his mother was buried. We had spent a day clinging to strangers’ graves on the wrong mountain. We laughed bitterly for a long time.
Even now, 40 years later, whenever I lose my way on the path called life, I think back to that day at the cemetery. Though we never found my friend’s mother’s grave, I remember the day I chose not to leave my friend alone in his sorrow. Though we didn’t reach our destination, I recall the day I stayed by someone’s side. Now, I believe that the sweat we shed together and our clumsy, aimless steps that day were already the most precise prayers reaching up to the heavens.
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