I'm Sorry, Ji-wook
The news that Park Ji-wook had passed away froze Mongmong Animal Hospital in an instant.
Lee Jun and Go Gi-jin, still reeling from the shock, were already in the second-floor break room. They had hurried upstairs, unwilling to let the clients waiting below see the stunned looks on their faces.
Cha Da-jeong shuffled in, and the moment she saw the two of them, the tears came first.
"Th-this can't be happening. Why would Senior Park... h-hhk."
"Haaah... so Senior finally..."
Yoo Mu-hwan came in after her, let out something that sounded as if he already knew, then dropped his head and exhaled a long, heavy sigh.
Yeo Un-hyeok kicked the break room door open, disbelief written all over his face.
"S-Senior? Is it really true?"
Kim Jaeyeon was just as shaken.
"S-Senior Park has passed on? Th-that's impossible."
Go Gi-jin, already crumpled in a break room chair with tears running down his face, opened his mouth.
"...... Khk. H-how much must he have suffered, huh? If it was that hard, he should've just quit, shouldn't he? He could've just not done it, and that would've been fine! Ain't that right? Hyung-nim! We became vets to save animals, not to kill 'em, didn't we? So why'd we have to—why? Why'd Ji-wook hyung-nim have to hurt like that? Why?"
Still sobbing, Go Gi-jin lurched to his feet, grabbed the shoulder of Lee Jun—who had turned toward the window and was letting out a quiet breath—and held on.
"S-say somethin', hyung-nim. Why do we gotta be like this? Why?"
He was practically screaming it, shaking Lee Jun hard, but there was no focus in Lee Jun's eyes.
Lee Jun was in no less pain than Go Gi-jin. He might have been in even more. Swallowed by shock and grief, he clenched his teeth until they ached. If he let himself cry, he was afraid the entire hospital would drown in tears with him.
He drew a deep breath and thought, There's still clinic left. Which meant he could not afford to grieve freely. Not yet. He would grieve after every appointment was done, after every surgery was finished. Yes. Then I'll grieve as much as I want. I have to. Even now, there were sick animals waiting for his hands.
He pulled in a few more long breaths, steadied himself, and caught hold of Go Gi-jin's arm—the arm of a man whose soul looked as if it had drifted far away.
"Gi-jin. Dr. Go!"
Whether he couldn't hear his name or simply couldn't answer it, Go Gi-jin only clung to him and kept crying. At least he had stopped shaking him the way he had a moment before. Lee Jun patted his arm and went on.
"Dr. Go. Let's get through the rest of the schedule first, and then we'll go. Let's go see Ji-wook off, okay?"
Lee Jun had expected him to shout that none of it mattered. Instead, Go Gi-jin simply nodded.
"...... Yeah. I hear ya."
His shoulders sagged, and he walked back toward his exam room. Watching him go, Lee Jun turned to the others.
"Come on. Everyone, let's get back to our posts. The sick kids aren't going to stop hurting just because we're sitting here, are they? Let's go treat them."
"...... Yes."
"Und...erstood."
"You're right."
"Th-then I'll go prep for surgery."
One by one, they filed out of the break room. Their retreating figures looked exactly like Go Gi-jin's. All of them drained of strength.
And yet, once they were back at their stations, they saw their patients as if it were any other day. It was the same for Lee Jun and Kim Jaeyeon once they stepped into the operating room.
The moment Yoo Mu-hwan looked at the animals hurting right in front of him, Lee Jun's words flashed through his mind. That's right. This little one isn't going to get better just because I'm grieving. Get it together. He worked the way he always did—no. He worked even harder than usual.
Cha Da-jeong was no different. She stared at the monitor with eyes swollen nearly shut, but everything in front of her stayed blurred. She was supposed to find the parts that weren't normal, the places that differed from healthy tissue—and she couldn't tell what was normal and what wasn't. Honestly, she didn't want to. A part of her wondered what any of it was even for.
Then Go Gi-jin's cry came back to her. That they had become veterinarians to save animals.
"That's right."
She opened her eyes wide and stared at the monitor. Her puffy lids drooped over her eyes and narrowed her field of vision, but that didn't matter. She could just squint and look until she found it.
The other veterinarians were the same. Every one of them stood at their post and gave the work in front of them everything they had.
The day's work ended at seven-thirty that evening.
"Please go on ahead."
"I could go later. I'm sorry."
"No, Director. You go first. I'll stay and follow after."
"Alright. I'm counting on you."
"Yes."
"Please be careful, all of you."
Yeo Un-hyeok stayed on night duty. Kim Jaeyeon remained to care for the dog they had operated on. Yeo Un-hyeok would pay his respects the next day; Kim Jaeyeon planned to go late that night. And so Lee Jun left Mongmong Animal Hospital with Go Gi-jin, Yoo Mu-hwan, and Cha Da-jeong.
Their destination was the Cheil University Hospital Funeral Hall.
Inside the taxi that carried the four of them, no one spoke. Only the occasional sigh broke the quiet. If anyone had opened their mouth, tears or lament would have been sure to follow. Rush hour had packed the roads, and the taxi crawled forward like a tortoise. None of the four, their minds too full, even registered the congestion.
The silent cab ran for nearly an hour before it reached its destination.
By the time Lee Jun's group arrived at the wake, many mourners were already there. Most of the faces were familiar. Eom Jin-hwan, standing in front of the memorial hall, greeted them.
"You made it."
"Yeah. Quite a crowd."
"Well. The professors stopped by a little while ago and already left."
"I see."
"Yes."
That was the end of the conversation. It was the kind of event that could silence even Eom Jin-hwan, who was usually never short on words.
Lee Jun signed the guest book in turn and offered his condolence money. Then he walked toward the memorial portrait.
He laid a single white chrysanthemum before his friend's photograph, and a tangle of thoughts crowded through his mind. The first among them was this: I'm sorry.
He was sorry he had failed to see into his friend's suffering. Sorry he had not been there when Ji-wook was hurting alone.
You chose the brutal study of oncology and walked that path without a word, hoping the kids suffering from cancer would hurt even a little less—and you still had to make this decision... Just how shredded did your heart become? Huh, Ji-wook?
Full of apology and regret, Lee Jun offered incense. Then he moved to where his classmates had gathered.
"You made it?" Choi Woo-jin, already seated, greeted him. The rest offered Lee Jun nothing but sighs, and Lee Jun's own reply was just as brief.
"Yeah."
"It's a bitter thing," one of them burst out.
"Haaah. It is. I feel sorry. For him."
"Same here. I was on the phone with Ji-wook just a week ago. If I'd known it would come to this, I wouldn't have called. I would have gone to see him."
"Me too. I talked to him two days ago. I have an old dog with hepatocellular carcinoma, and I was running the case by him. He gave me the most careful comments on how to keep the little one comfortable and in less pain... I never thought he'd make a decision like that."
"That's what I mean. He was that devoted when it came to the animals, and yet he himself..."
"I talked to him just yesterday morning. We've got a seven-year-old Goldendoodle at our clinic named Sookja, with mediastinal lymphoma. I sent her to Ji-wook, and he treated her so well she came all the way back to a normal condition. You should have seen how happy the guardian was... so I called to thank him. He was clearly glad, too, and yet..."
Story after story about Park Ji-wook spilled from his classmates without a break. Lee Jun was in the same position. He, too, had leaned on Park Ji-wook for more tumor cases than he could count. Among them, Ji-wook had been the best with oncology, and whenever a tumor case came in, his classmates had always turned to him. Seniors and juniors had done the same. A difficult oncology case, and someone always reached out a hand to Park Ji-wook.
Of course, when a case called for a difficult surgery beyond medical oncology, Park Ji-wook had reached back—to Lee Jun, to his classmates, to seniors and juniors alike. Which meant he had been in contact with people constantly. Always.
"Haaah. And we still couldn't do a single thing for him while he was making a decision that hard. After calling him day in and day out, no less." Choi Woo-jin lifted his soju glass, knocked it back, and pulled a bitter face.
"That's exactly it. He must have been struggling. He must have sent us signs... and we didn't catch them. I'm really sorry. I mean it."
Lee Jun agreed, and drained the soju sitting on the table. He knew he shouldn't drink—he had clinic the next day, as he almost always did—but he couldn't not.
"Haaah. Last year, was it? Dr. Woo Yu-jeong also left this world making the same choice as Ji-seok."
At Choi Woo-jin's words, one of the classmates looked up, startled.
"Woo Yu-jeong? From Myeongseong University?"
"Yeah."
"Ah..."
"Haaah... another person we couldn't afford to lose."
No one asked why they had taken their own lives. Everyone already knew the reason.
"Honestly, I don't think I could stay sane in that work either. They held on a long time."
"It'd be weirder if the depression didn't set in."
Woo Yu-jeong had volunteered at abandoned-animal shelters since her undergraduate years, and she had kept volunteering at those facilities even after graduation. Lee Jun and Choi Woo-jin had been on personal terms with her since school for that very reason. But unlike Uriteul Shelter, the facility where she served was one that performed euthanasia—the kind of place that posted a public notice and put an animal down if no adopter came forward within the designated period.
No one could condemn it. Not the municipality that had written the rule, and not the veterinarian who carried it out. With shelters overflowing and so many abandoned animals coming in every single day, someone had to make room.
"Haaah. The stress on Dr. Woo, on Ji-wook—it must have been unreal. I euthanize maybe once or twice a year, if that, and it still sits wrong in my chest for a long time after."
"Same. And it's not even our decision to make."
"Right. I'll think, if we just give this medication, this one could live a few more months without pain—and the guardian doesn't see it that way. Times like that, I even catch myself thinking, what did we do wrong?"
"Those kids looking up at me with clear eyes, and I have to do it with my own hands... and I can't even cry in front of the guardians..."
"How are we supposed to not have depression? We already watch so many of the sick ones become stars even after we treat them. And then we have to add to that number with our own hands? I understand Ji-wook. I understand Dr. Woo Yu-jeong too."
"I... if I'd known it would be like this, I would have gone into research instead."
"You think it'd be fine if you went there? Don't you remember? Back in undergrad, during the immunology practicum, that senior who worked at a pharmaceutical company came and bought us drinks."
"Yeah, I remember. We were whining that the immunology lab was too hard and ate up too much time, and that senior got drunk and cried. What would you kids know, he said. Do you know what it feels like to have to make a hundred hamster liver tissue samples? Do you know what those hundred samples mean? He sobbed it at us. And while he was crying, he told us not to go into research."
"That's right. He said just because they're small doesn't mean the weight of their lives is small. I can still hear that as if he said it yesterday."
"Me too. I remember."
The ten people seated at the table lifted their soju glasses as if they had agreed on it in advance, and drank. The bitterness on their faces was identical, all ten of them. Lee Jun's was no different.
They had entered veterinary school because they loved animals, or because their college exam scores had pointed them there, and they had become veterinarians. It was a vocation of real fulfillment—that much was true. The joy of watching an animal that had been dying on its feet walk out of the hospital on its own was beyond words. But the sense of loss was just as large.
"Do people even know that we veterinarians have a suicide rate more than four times higher than the general population?"
"They probably don't even know it's more than twice that of physicians."
"Yeah. They wouldn't."
Faces that had already been dark grew darker still. Perhaps because, somewhere deep down, most of them had been carrying the same thoughts as Park Ji-wook.
For a while, the only sounds at the table were glasses being filled and soju being knocked back. Then Lee Jun spoke.
"Maybe it's worse because we watch the whole of a life. People don't go to die in the pediatric clinic where they got their shots as kids, do they?"
"You're right, Lee Jun. That sounds right."
Choi Woo-jin nodded, and everyone else at the table agreed with the same force.
"Exactly. Run a neighborhood clinic for ten, twenty years, and you end up watching the little ones who came in for their first and second vaccinations all the way until they become stars in their old age. It happens more than you'd think."
"That's what I mean. Back in school, when we visited the seniors' clinics, we heard that all the time. That the little ones kept getting older. That they were becoming stars, one and then two at a time, and it sat so heavy on them..."
"Those seniors were living with Pet Loss Syndrome. And I'm starting to understand how they felt. Sometimes I can't even fall asleep unless I drink."
"That's a shortcut to becoming an alcoholic."
"Yeah, it is. But I do the same thing as this guy—go home, drink by myself, and pass out."
After that, they all confessed much the same things. Most of what came out of their mouths was this: how hard it was to share what they actually felt with anyone else. And they couldn't even talk frankly with their own classmates or fellow veterinarians, because no one's hours off ever lined up.
Lee Jun looked around at his classmates' grim faces and sank into thought. They're all drowning in this grief. Tomorrow they'll see patients and operate as if nothing happened, but that won't make the depression underneath go away. I wish I could do something. Regular gatherings, maybe—wouldn't that help?
The thought rose, and he dismissed it just as quickly. Inwardly, at least. We can't even pull off a proper staff dinner at a small clinic like ours.
Lee Jun filled his glass, and the thought kept going.