A few days ago as I was walking back to my house after a jog, an old woman decided to become my friend. She was eighty years old, bent, weathered and wearing the typical mismatching grandma clothes that I see so often in Korea. When she saw me her face cracked into a wrinkly smile and she grabbed my hand. She started talking to me about her daughter who lived in the US and a lot of other things I couldn't understand. I kept telling her I didn't speak much Korean but it didn't matter, she was determined to communicate with me. After a few minutes of this I realized that this old woman probably spoke Japanese since she had grown up during the Japanese occupation era. I asked if she did and she responded in haltering Japanese.

Our conversation after that was much more meaningful. As she spoke, her Japanese became much more fluent, better than mine in fact. We walked around my apartment complex still hand in hand and talked about the Japanese language, her life during the occupation and about her family scattered across Korea. I discovered that she was living alone, having opted to move back to her home town rather than live in Seoul with her children. Her daughter who was living in the States paid the apartment bills and her eldest son, she proudly told me would come visit her from time to time. And yet there was a sadness to her.

"I'm just waiting to die," she said. "I'm too old to be of much use." She had passed out in her home four times from a weak heart and body. Her back caused her constant pain that left her shrunken and bent. She knew the end was near and that one day she would faint and never wake up. She had come home to die.

As we parted ways and I walked back to my apartment I was struck by our meeting. I wanted to offer this old woman hope, I wanted to give her something to live for in the last years of her life. I couldn't shake the feeling of dissatisfaction. Was this what the end of life will be like, simply waiting for the inevitable to take place? Surely there must be something to live for even at eighty.