Born in 1935 into a wealthy household in Gangneung, she entered life at a time when being a daughter meant learning obedience instead of letters. Education was never offered to her; instead, her childhood was shaped by endless farm labor and domestic work, under the harsh discipline of her own mother. Affection was scarce, and survival was the first language she learned. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, she did not flee south. For three years, she lived in the mountains by day and returned home only at night, hiding her existence between gunfire and hunger. Those years carved silence into her bones — a silence she would carry for the rest of her life. She married young and began her married life in Gangneung, joining a family marked by extreme poverty. Her husband, the eldest son, bore the full weight of tradition, responsibility, and survival. With more than ten siblings to care for, hardship was not an episode but a permanent condition. She became the invisible pillar of a collapsing household, sustaining a family that history had already wounded. Decades passed. Children were born, including a son in 1965, who would grow up witnessing her strength without ever fully understanding its origin. Life unfolded through poverty, recovery, modernization, and quiet endurance — until her final days in a hospital room in 2023. For three nights, her son stayed beside her as she approached death. What he witnessed was not merely dying, but something profoundly strange and unsettling — a threshold between life and whatever lies beyond it. In those final moments, the silence she had lived with all her life began to speak. This novel is not only the story of a mother, but of a generation that lived before words, before choices, and before mercy. It is a meditation on survival, inherited trauma, unspoken love, and the mysterious passage between life and death — seen through the eyes of a son who finally begins to understand his mother at the moment he is about to lose her.