“I rediscovered life in the light of death and promised myself I wouldn’t think of suicide but live as happily as possible until a natural death claims me.” Park Kyung Rye who attended a ‘well-dying’ class

SEOUL—Park Kyung Rye, 80, enrolled in a “well-dying” class in Seoul when the death of her husband of six decades left her suicidal.

Lonely and ailing, she sought relief in the six-week course that shows seniors how to appreciate life by preparing for death. The well-dying class — the name is a play on well-being — reflects efforts to combat the developed world’s highest elderly suicide rate. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates 37 per cent of the population will be older than 65 by 2050, a trend that President Park Geun Hye called “frightening” early this year.

“I’m now more at peace with myself and my husband’s passing,” Park Kyung Rye said in an interview. “I rediscovered life in the light of death and promised myself I wouldn’t think of suicide but live as happily as possible until a natural death claims me.”

Many of the generation that built Asia’s fourth-biggest economy from the ruins of the Korean War now find themselves mired in poverty, left behind by the economic boom they helped construct. For President Park, elderly suicide is both a threat to public health and a test of her pledge to improve support for seniors, who are a key to her Saenuri party maintaining power after her term ends in 2018.

Almost 5,000 South Koreans over the age of 60 took their lives in 2012, up from 4,300 five years earlier.

A chief reason is that the poverty rate among South Korea’s elderly was the highest in the OECD at 49.3 per cent in 2012.

“We’re headed for one unhappy society that’s both aged and suicidal,” said Lee Jung Min, professor of labour economics at Seoul’s Sogang University.

Korea was slow to reward its elderly for building one of the world’s most dynamic economies after the war. South Korea’s pension system began in 1988 and didn’t cover all workers until 1999. It wasn’t made retroactive to those working before its inception, although a basic minimum payout for the elderly was added in 2008.

The OECD estimates that only one-fifth of seniors receive a regular pension, while 70 per cent get the minimum old-age benefit. That payout is set at about 5 per cent of the average wage, a fraction of the minimum living cost of 20 per cent, the OECD says.

With the elderly poverty rate rising, the government is stepping up spending on suicide prevention with efforts such as the well-dying schools, which have spread since 2006.

Park, a retired house cleaner with no pension, relies on support from her three children to get by. She lives in a 20-year-old government-built apartment in northern Seoul that her husband purchased with a lump-sum pension payout from his job as a civil servant.

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“The loneliness of being left alone pushed me to the edge,” said Park. “The chronic pain in my legs and back made it worse. I was unprepared to live alone and started having bad thoughts, very bad thoughts.”

At the school, Park joined nearly 20 other seniors in embracing their mortality. They visited a crematorium and a possible resting place for their ashes in a nearby forest. They had portrait photos taken, which are traditionally displayed at Korean funerals. They wrote autobiographies, made video messages for their families, and crafted plaster replicas of their hands as symbols of appreciation for themselves. Park keeps hers on top of her television set.

“South Koreans tend to think of death as a quick way to end their difficulties,” said Park Hoon, a researcher at the Institute of Life and Death Studies at Hallym University in Chuncheon, near Seoul. “But death should be seen as a reminder of how precious life is and why life is so worth living. That’s what well-dying schools try to teach, by confronting their students with the positive nature of death.”