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In April 2005, we spotted a tearjerker on the Internet about a mother who gave up one of her eyes to a son who had lost one of his at an early age. By February 2007 the item was circulating in e-mail in the following shortened version: In its earlier incarnation, the story identified by implication its location as Korea through statements made by both the mother and the son (the son's I left my mother and came to Seoul and the mother's I won't visit Seoul anymore). It also supplied a reason for the son's behavior when his mother arrived unexpectedly to visit him (My little girl ran away, scared of my mom's eye and I screamed at her, 'How dare you come to my house and scare my daughter!'). A further twist was provided in the original: rather than gaining the news of his mother's death from neighbors (who hand him her letter), the son instead discovered the woman who bore him lying dead on the floor of what used to be his childhood home, her missive to him clutched in her lifeless hand: With all modern medical technology, transplantation of the eyeball is still impossible. The optic nerve isn't an ordinary nerve, but instead an inset running from the brain. Modern medicine isn't able to connect an eyeball back to brain after an optic nerve has been severed, let alone transplant the eye from a different person. (The only exception is the cornea, the transparent part in front of the eye: corneas are transplanted to replace injured and opaque ones.) We won't try to comment on whether any surgeon would accept an eye from a living donor for transplant into another — we'll leave that to others who are far more knowledgeable about medical ethics and transplant procedures. But we will note that the plot device of a mother's dramatic sacrifice for the sake of her child's being revealed in a written communication delivered after her demise appears in another legend about maternal love: the 2008 tale about a woman who left a touching message on her cell phone even as life ebbed from her as she used her body to shield the tot during an earthquake. Giving up one's own life for a loved one is central to a 2005 urban legend about a boy on a motorcycle who has his girlfriend hug him one last time and put on his helmet just before the crash that kills him and spares her. Returning to the notes from the dead theme is the 1995 story about a son who discovers only through a posthumous letter from his mother what their occasional dinner dates had meant to her. Another legend we're familiar with features a meme used in the one-eyed mother story (the coming to light of the enduring love of the person who died for the completely unworthy person she'd lavished it on), but that one involves a terminally ill woman and her cheating husband. In it, an about-to-be-spurned wife begs the adulterous hoon she'd married to stick around for another 30 days and to carry her over the threshold of their home once every day of that month as her way of keeping him around long enough for her to kick the bucket and thus spare their son the knowledge that his parents were on the verge of divorce. The one-eyed mother story expounds upon two moral messages: the unconditional, all-encompassing love we expect mothers to always feel for their children, and the admonition to not put off cherishing loved ones and appreciating their sacrifices while they're still around.
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