Requiescat in pace, Lee Sun-kyun

By CHUN SU-JIN
The author is the head of the Today-People News team at the JoongAng Ilbo.

Is the meaningless repetition of loss and oblivion what life is all about? Professor Lim Byeong-sik, an expert in “thanatology,” says that living means constantly losing something. Losing something entails pain. The news of the late actor Lee Sun-kyun, who took his own life at the end of last year, was painful. I felt bitter while witnessing the witch-hunting comments morphing into criticism of the police and media.

The death has been consumed in a disturbing way. Rather than sincere condolences, there is half-hearted emotional venting — and an eruption of voices claiming to be “justice fighters.” When I asked Professor Lim about it, he said, “We easily convict and misunderstand the deaths of others. We judge other people based on self-centered thinking.”

How helpless must his family feel? I want to convey my condolences with the words of a webtoon artist and the author of “I am a Suicide Survivor,” who lived through the suicide of her father. “Life is a river after all, it has to flow. It has to flow, and it flows away,” she said.

Grief should be addressed with sadness and condolences, not anger. When you cry, you should cry until you can’t cry anymore, instead of holding back tears, the author says. Many readers must have cried when they read the line, “You can cry as much as you want.”

From death to unilateral separation, loss with many faces is part of our life. In the newly released Netflix movie “Good Grief,” there is a line that says, “To avoid sadness is to avoid love.” Struggling to forget the sadness caused by loss could mean closing your eyes to love. Philosophers of all times and ages have agreed that one should fully feel loss and sadness in order to move on to the next chapter of life. The 13th century Persian poet Rumi wrote, “Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror up to where you are bravely working.” Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) said that only those who can love can feel sadness and heal.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), a cynical philosopher who is gaining popularity in Korea, is also worth referring to. The philosopher, who once argued that happiness was an illusion, said that one has to live long to see how short life is. Trying to find meanings from a seemingly meaningless life, even while mourning another’s death, may be the stone that Sisyphus must roll. I pray for the late actor Lee Sun-kyun.