Her
left hand was cold and motionless. I intertwined my pudgy, pink fingers between
her delicate icy ones, trying not to look at the missing fingernails or last
vestiges of ones the chemotherapy hadn't rotted away. It was so hard sit and
listening to the water-choked gurgling that was her breathing. I hope you never
have to listen to someone drown from the fluid in their own lungs.
It
had only been a week since my mother had broken the news to us. Sitting upright,
skinny but with a swelling belly of liquid bile from her failing liver; hospice
was finally being brought in she said. While she never explicitly said that
this was the end, we knew there was no longer an occasion to feign hope of a
miraculous turn-around. Anger rose and fell between tears of disappointed
acceptance. She'd never live to plant next year’s garden, never live to start
that business she always talked about, never live to meet grandchildren. After that devastating meeting with my mom, siblings, and uncle, gathered around
my mother's blanket-laden perch on the couch, my sister and I returned to her
house to stew over the inevitable. We sat paused over cups of tea, between
bouts of haunted silence we posed questions of what could or should have been
done – and more importantly what do we do now?
One
of my mother's last requests was to have a funeral service and burial in the
style of her religious community; the ‘Seung Hwa’ ceremony of Reverend SunMyung Moon’s Unification Church. Funeral services of any faith are costly, and the
estimated costs of my mother’s impending burial was weighing heavily on our
minds; there simply wasn’t any money to cover the services.
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Seung Hwa of Reverand Moon's eldest son, Hyo Jin, who passed away from a heart attack. Yay cocaine. |
My
parents had spent most of their life employed in the service of Reverend Moon
and his ‘providence’. Once joining the cult back in the 1970’s both had only
ever held employment in one of the companies or organizations that belonged to the Moons. The time commitments they made that didn’t fall into free labor category never resulted in pension or a
retirement plan - they also never amounted to much income. In fact, it was more
often than not that my paternal grandmother paid the rent on whatever home our family
resided in at the time, purchased new cars for my father, and paid off the
expensive student loan debt he acquired from a PhD he never used lucratively.
Thus, with most of the financial bases covered, it gave my father the ability
to strut about in a suit with a briefcase, rub shoulders with important members
of the church, and have an office in the Unification Theological Seminary
without the added pressure of terms such as ‘401K’, ‘retirement’, or 'affordable
healthcare' that wasn’t government sponsored. My father could spend the measly
income he earned on new toys for himself such as new MAC laptops and Nexus
cellphones, while my mother watched from the couch as she lay dying from the
lack of care that Medicaid could provide. Services from Sloane Kettering
or The Cancer Centers of America simply were not within our family’s financial
means.
This
was also true for covering the costs of my mom’s Seung Hwa funeral ceremony.
None of my siblings worked jobs where we could tuck thousands of excess
income into savings, and my mother’s brother worked as a translator in Mexico
for less money than any of us were pulling in. The committee of Unification Church
members who were helping to organize my mother’s funeral proceedings came over to discuss details, and when they mentioned
the cost of her Seung Hwa services a
member looked to my father and asked if there was money set aside to pay for
the funeral. He deflected responsibility by insinuating that my mother’s
recently deceased parents had set aside funds for her in a bank account, when
my usually mild- mannered uncle cut in with “No. There is not a fund.”
At
one point my sister was asked to take out a private loan in her name to cover
the costs, which seemed unfair as she still carried the weight of student
loans. One of my younger brothers had offered to throw all of his savings to
help cover part of the funeral, and my uncle suggested we reach out to the
Unification Church community for help. As an outsider from the church who hasn’t
been exposed to its culture of financial vampirism, it seemed like a logical
proposition to my uncle – after all in the real world one’s religious community
is meant to provide support to those in times of need. But how could we ask
that of Reverend Moon’s ‘first generation’ of followers? People who had spent
years living out of 15 passenger vans and fundraising for his cult movement byselling trinkets to strangers.
![]() |
My mother with the Reverend and Mrs. Sung Myung Moon at a CAUSA event. |
People
who had tithed most of their income to Moon’s church - instead of paying for
their kid’s braces, paying for their children’s education, learn how to invest the money they did have, or setting aside for
retirement or worse. This is the conundrum many of us ‘second generation’ face
as we approach our late twenties or early thirties. We, the children of parents
who chose ‘God’ and a false idol over their own means, are now left with the
realization our parents are entering their senior citizen years with no
monetary means to support them.
After the meeting with our mother concerning the
impending involvement of hospice, my sister
Jennifer looked up from her cup of tea-gone-cold and asked; “What do you think about crowd funding?”
![]() |
As
in Amanda Palmer-and-‘The Art of Asking’-crowd
funding? Kickstarter and IndieGogo? Was that possible for people like us? I
mean, it made sense for the whirlwind/creative/feminist/musical force clad in a
kimono+arm warmers that was Amanda *Fucking* Palmer, but who were we to ask
the people of the internet for help?
What would make anyone want to reach out and help us when it seemed this was a situation of my parent’s own making? Could you even make a crowdfunding page for something concerning medical bills or anything unrelated to the receiving of a preconceived product or service? If we had we known that in less than two weeks my mother would pass on we would have begun investigating options sooner.
What would make anyone want to reach out and help us when it seemed this was a situation of my parent’s own making? Could you even make a crowdfunding page for something concerning medical bills or anything unrelated to the receiving of a preconceived product or service? If we had we known that in less than two weeks my mother would pass on we would have begun investigating options sooner.
We
took an evening to meditate on the possibility of a crowd funding page, and by
the next morning my sister had set up a page on GiveForward.com with
a campaign acknowledging that our mother was losing her eight-year battle with
breast cancer, and explained the financial predicaments we found ourselves in with
wanting to fulfill her last wishes.
Admittedly, I was incredible nervous…and
ashamed to ask for the help of others. Many of my friends and coworkers were
unaware of the religious cult I was raised in, nor my family’s financial/power
dynamics that had resulted in the Give Forward page for my mother’s funeral. After
estimates from the local funeral home in town and online research about the
average funeral costs in 2014, we decided to set the campaign goal number to $10,000. The account
was set up where we would receive email notifications if the campaign page was
shared on social media or if it had received a donation, and to my surprise we
pulled in well over two-thousand dollars on the first day of it being online - more
than $1,500 of it coming from people in my specific social circle. My mom passed away
two days after we launched the GiveForward page, and her Seung Hwa funeral
services were scheduled for three days after she died.
We
surpassed the ten thousand dollar goal with the help from our coworkers, our
friends, our friends parents, our significant others and their parents, and
even some members of the Unification Church who found it within their means to
give money in tribute to a friend. Ultimately, every penny donated through the
crowd funding was used to cover the cost of the funeral services and the headstone
placed above my mother in Tivoli, NY. We are unsure where the checks and money that were handed
to my father at the funeral went, yet he asked us to make a donation from our
crowd fund money to give to the Barrytown Unification Theological seminary and to
those who presided over the arrangements.
Many
Unification Church members were dressed in white or light colors (as do Koreans
at a funeral,) when we arrived at my mother's Seung Hwa. A man who had never met my mother emceed the services, making
grand proclamations about her character and dedication to God. Those who knew
her and planned the Sueng Hwa for my mother, knew so little about her that they chose ‘America, The
Beautiful’ as a funeral hymn – because of her allegiance to America? A man whom
both my parents had worked for in many capacities over the years, Dr. Bo Hi
Pak, did not attend but sent a letter meant to be about my mother but instead
glorified “True Father” (Reverend Moon.) Someone even had the audacity to hire
a photographer to document the entire event, a young teenager whom my father
waved over to the family table at the funeral reception to “take a group photo”.
Despite being an innocent party, I ripped the teen photographer a new one as he
attempted to photograph me with a table of my friends. Who wants to pose for
pictures on the day they bury their mother?
I
am sitting here in a coffee shop in Queens writing this 6 months to the day of my mother’s passing. My love and gratitude goes out to the friends of mine
who went out of their way to be there with us on the day of her funeral; those
who dropped their previous engagements and drove hundreds of miles out of the
way to be there. My love goes out to the ones who couldn’t make it, but sent
money and love even if they themselves were experiencing battles with cancer
themselves. So much love to the friends who sat with us and witnessed one of
the strangest events they’d ever experience - a Unification Church Seung Hwa is nothing like what one’s contemporary
understanding of what a funeral should be.

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