hankyoreh

A handwritten note sits among white chrysanthemums on Nov. 1 at a joint memorial altar for those killed in the Itaewon crowd surge. (Yoon Woon-sik/The Hankyoreh)

“My baby, what am I going to do?”

The mother wailed when the hearse came through the gate of a certain high school in Seoul at 8 am on Wednesday, carrying the body of her 17-year-old son, surnamed Kim, a victim of the Itaewon disaster last weekend.

As Kim’s mother ran her fingers along the coffin in the hearse, her cries rang through the school’s sports field.

Following the funeral procession, Kim was taken on his final journey to school.

A student in the second year of high school, Kim and a classmate (surnamed Lee, aged 17) went out to the Itaewon neighborhood for Halloween festivities on Saturday, where they were killed along with scores of other people in a deadly crowd crush.

When Kim’s mother stepped out of the vehicle at the school her son had been attending until just a few days ago, she began to cry as if her world were collapsing.

Her sorrow was so great she could hardly move, and she barely managed to get in the vehicle, with the help of her family members.

Some 50 students and teachers who were there to see Kim off on his final journey wiped their eyes and lowered their heads as his mother wept.

“Kim’s father fainted when he heard about the accident. The shock was so great that he couldn’t even take part in the funeral procession,” said Jeong In-seong, 62, Kim’s great-uncle on his mother’s side.

After walking around the school for about ten minutes, carrying the funeral photograph of her son, Kim’s mother bowed low before his teachers, performing the obeisance that Kim can no longer do.

The sound of weeping spread across the sports field, echoing off the slopes of a nearby hill.

Family members of a 17-year-old victim of the Itaewon crush said that upon receiving the pictured floral arrangement from President Yoon Suk-yeol on Nov. 1, they immediately tore off the marker with the president’s name. (Ko Byung-chan/The Hankyoreh)

The funeral processions for Kim and Lee, who both lost their lives in the Itaewon disaster, began early on Wednesday morning. After carrying out the coffin, the two families took turns visiting the sports field of the boys’ high school to perform a ritual offering.

Lee’s family took his body out of the morgue at Sahmyook Medical Center, in Seoul’s Dongdaemun District, at 4:30 am on Wednesday. Some 30 family members and friends gathered for the solemn procession, which took the form of a religious service.

During the funeral procession, an elderly individual — hair white, bearing a cane — stroked Lee’s photograph, which appeared on a screen in front of the funeral reception hall.

Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol sent a wreath to express his condolences for the deaths of the high school students, but their family members weren’t pleased. Kim’s family said they ripped up and threw away Yoon’s name tag on the wreath.

“We thought about rejecting the wreath but ended up accepting it since the delivery person had gone to all that trouble. But the wreath didn’t offer any comfort since it only had the president’s name on the tag without any message of sympathy for the deceased,” Jeong said.

“Our boy’s life was cut short in an accident that could have been prevented, but wasn’t. They should have referred to the dead as ‘victims’ rather than ‘deceased’ at the memorial altar. It’s all so frustrating.”

By Ko Byung-chan, staff reporter

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