814-word version:
Just as I returned to Seoul for summer vacation in 2006, sorrow pervaded all my senses. As my parents came to meet me at the airport, I saw my uncle’s ominous visage overlapping behind my parents’. That was the year my uncle died of lung cancer at the age of 55. He died so abruptly that no one in our family was even obscurely prepared for the separation. But to add to my unalleviated sorrow, my cousin, my uncle’s son, too, was diagnosed for the same dreadful disease only a few months after my uncle’s death and was announced that he had only a month to live...

625-word version:
Just as I returned to Seoul for summer vacation in 2006, sorrow pervaded all my senses. As my parents came to meet me at the airport, I saw my uncle’s ominous visage overlapping behind my parents’. That was the year my uncle died of lung cancer at the age of 55. He died so abruptly that no one in our family was even obscurely prepared for the separation...