Sehee Does Not Make It to Switzerland

A woman prepares to leave for Switzerland, not for travel, but for the last decision left to her. At the threshold of departure, caregiving, duty, and the body of her aging mother pull her back into the life she had tried to end on her own terms. Sehee Does Not Make It to Switzerland is a restrained literary work about aging, caregiving, medical authority, and the limits of self-determination at the end of life. Old Mrs. Kim, ninety years old and living with chronic pain, gathers fragments of information from television, newspapers, and other elderly people around her. She wants a law that will allow her to die without being kept alive by procedures she fears. Her eldest daughter, Sehee, takes her through Korea's administrative system for life-sustaining treatment decisions, only to discover that the final judgment still belongs elsewhere: to doctors, institutions, and the legal limits of a society that has not granted death as a fully personal choice. As her mother's language circles around pain, fear, food, sleep, and the absent first-person "I," Sehee's own body begins to fail. Diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, she quietly researches Swiss assisted dying organizations and prepares to leave. Yet the story does not move toward a simple act of escape. It remains inside the apartment, the doorway, the walker, the food delivery, the family silence, and the unbearable weight of being the daughter who cannot abandon the mother who has already lost the language of herself. Socially grounded yet psychologically precise, this story examines how a person's right to die can be deferred not only by law and medicine, but also by love, resentment, duty, and the unresolved claims of family.