Mourning # 18
We could drink this whole bottle
of Mom’s best bourbon, but we’d
have to toast with every sip an’
I’m not sure we could think of
enough good things to say about
the old bat, and I have to pick up the kids from ballet.
After his divorce like twenty years ago
he lived alone and now he died
alone and old with the television on
when the neighbors called the cops
because of the smell. Evidently
he got sick and just surrendered to the pain and its relief.
The only person that she told was her brother
that her job caring for dying COVID patients
weighed on her so much that she’d almost
rather die, neither took the remark seriously
but then she got pneumonia from the virus
and told her brother, just before she went into
the ICU that she never meant what she’d said
she was just tired and depressed and angry at the government.
Every story is a story.
---- Han Sim (Kim) Hildebrand grew up in
a fishing village on the island of Dura-Ri
in South Korea where she suffered from hunger
in her childhood. She was 4 feet 11 inches tall.
She married an American serviceman and moved
to Missouri. She had to learn English. She knew
no other Koreans in her new home. Her marriage
didn’t last. Her second marriage didn’t either.
Then she married Jim Hildebrand, who called her
“the mouse that could fight the lion.” They were
married for 32 years until her death from Covid.
They built a thriving vegetable business.
Han Sim seemed to have beaten the coronavirus
after a two-month hospital stay. She was weaned off
the ventilator, she was in good spirits, smiling and
waving. The nurses said, “She’s like a Houdini, we
can’t believe how fast she’s come back.”
She was an inspiration and a model of strength
to her husband and children and everyone else
who knew her.
