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The question of healing came up repeatedly in our lives, especially after we began to tell people about Hyung Goo's illness. A lot of his relatives, in particular, thought that what you should do about AIDS was pray for healing. Hyung Goo wasn't quite sure how to respond to this. He would have liked nothing more than to be healed, and prayed himself for healing, but he wasn't sure he wanted to trail around to Korean Pentecostal faith healers, which seemed to be what his family members had in mind.

We broached the subject with the minister who had married us. Had he prayed with people for healing? Had he been invited to do so, or had he volunteered? What had happened as a result? David told us that he had been asked to pray with sick people for healing on various occasions. He had done so, and some had been healed and some hadn't. As he understood it, the initiative rested with the sick person—it was up to him or her to ask for such prayer, or not.

Hyung Goo found this enormously freeing. It made him feel that he was in charge of his own response to his illness. Other people could pray privately that he would be healed—that was fine and he welcomed it—but he could make his own decisions about whether to seek out formal prayer specifically for healing, and not feel that he was being delinquent if he didn't expend a lot of energy doing so.

By the fall of 1994, Hyung Goo had been seriously ill for a year. He had had pneumonia off and on since the spring, along with chronic anemia, nausea, pain, and the eye infection for which he was taking IV medication once or twice a day. In October I received a summons to jury duty in federal court. I wrote a letter requesting to be excused on the ground that there was serious illness in my family. Hyung Goo practically dictated the letter to me, and it came out sounding like he had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. "These people aren't rocket scientists," he said. "You have to make it very clear that you have to be at home to take care of me."

I found it unsettling to realize that there were, in fact, many days when Hyung Goo would have found it very difficult to take care of himself, even if that were construed to mean nothing more than getting his own meals. It wasn't that he needed to be waited on hand and foot all the time; it was that he simply didn't have the energy to do the regular everyday things that most of us spend a lot of time doing, and that I had become accustomed, of necessity, to doing for both of us.

In that same autumn, Hyung Goo began to be more joyfully engaged with life than almost ever before. I noticed the change increasingly as Christmas approached. The year before, he had been exhausted and in pain from starting chemotherapy at too high a dose, and miserably depressed from having to leave work. The only reason Christmas happened at all was that I made it happen by sheer force of will. But the next year, Hyung Goo was eager to get the tree, to do the shopping, to send the cards. I arrived home one day to find that he had just written the Christmas letter—something I had had to beg and plead with him to do the previous year. And he started talking about wanting prayer for healing.

I found this very disconcerting. We had spent the previous eight months planning the funeral, meeting with the funeral director and ministers, buying a cemetery plot—and now we were going to pray for healing, now that we were ready for him to die? And how was it that, as his health continued to deteriorate, he could be so happy, at least at those times when he had enough energy to feel something other than tired? I spelled out my puzzlement to a friend over the telephone. "Well," said Allan, "we're all going to die. That means that any prayer for healing is essentially a prayer for more time. It makes sense that as Hyung Goo realizes how seriously ill he is, and how short his time may be, he would be specially in love with life, and would want more time."

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August (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47