The late Kwon Young-Woo, the founder of Semyung University

Many years ago, one of our neighbors told my father that his wife had just died of cancer. I will always recall my father teaching me that there are never the perfect words to say to someone grieving from such a loss.

Yes, facing the loss of a loved one is probably the most difficult personal issue we address. Even Shakespeare, "The Bard," could only answer the question of what happens to people after they pass away by suggesting, "perchance to dream."

These thoughts came to me last April 26 when I attended the funeral of a great man, Dr. Kwon Young-Woo, the founder of our school, Semyung University. He was a self-made man who had successfully built a large transportation company and was a former two-term lawmaker. Then afterwards, instead of merely enjoying his well-deserved fortune, he undertook the long and difficult task of building a university that offers young people opportunities to seek out their own successes in life. In fact, our university was so important to him that his final chosen resting-place is at an on campus mountainside site overlooking the entire campus. Thus, all of us at the university feel a special bond with him.

At the funeral and after paying my personal respects by bowing, I then witnessed a poignant scene. The pallbearers picked up the ceremonial casket and waited a short while before ascending the mountain for burial. While this happened, Dr. Kwon's adult children were standing nearby and were all very visibly weeping for their loss. One of the daughters seemed to have been even more overwhelmed with grief and this touched me very personally. I had understood that she was very close to her strong father.

Just two years earlier, I had also lost my father, a successful man to whom I was very close. He had died from a similar affliction and at about the same age. So, while I watched her, I started to choke up. I wanted so much to console her and to let her know, as I had learned, of the peace that does come afterwards.

For we must look beyond the boundaries of our world. We too often define it by our very limited, everyday human perception. Instead, we must remember those times when the best of poems, music and other art forms have moved us to know that there is something special beyond it all. We all do know it, but there are never the perfect words to describe it.

And, in each of our lives, we are touched by certain souls in the same way. A few of them may touch us even more deeply to let us know even more clearly. It is these souls in our lives that are a special part of the power of that which we call human that binds us and can never be severed in this eternal universe. These souls are the flowers of our lives.

With this in mind, I may not have the perfect words, but this is the best that this fellow human being can offer a grieving daughter:

A flower is a beautiful thing to behold.

Its radiance gives us cause to be alive.

But, always comes the day that the flower must pass on, and sometimes sooner than we wish or expect.

Yet, like all things in this world of everlasting changes, it passes onto other fields that we cannot now know of.

And, if we safely keep its beauty in our hearts, that will someday help us find it yet again in another Spring blossoming even more beautifully than before.