It's a lesson too late for the learning . . .

My mother-in-law passed away last night.

It was quite sudden, and we were not prepared. I came home from my Japanese class and my wife was not quite frantically phoning her sisters. The sister that still lives in Michigan had called to tell her that their mother had been admitted to the hospital, and that the doctors had said she most likely only had a few hours left.

My father-in-law had taken her to the doctor that morning because she wasn't feeling well, and he had put her in the hospital immediately. She had pneumonia, and then things became terrible. My wife called the hospital. She talked to her father. She called an aunt and told her what was happening, and asked that she go to the hospital and support her dad. She searched online for a flight to Detroit, and kept calling the hospital and her sisters. And somewhere around 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, her father called her.


In amongst the packing and trying to plan for all the little things that would need to be done in the next few days along with the all too obvious big things, we talked. At one point she said a part of her hurt because she hadn't been able to get there in time to say good-bye; and she asked if it didn't help me a bit that I was able to be with my father for his last couple days.

It did at the time, but . . .

I had to tell her that now, whenever I think of my father I don't see the active, loving, fiercely alive man who had raised me; but an empty shell who's only sign of life was his almost mechanical breathing. For three days he laid there. Never moving. Not even twitching except for that barely visible movement of his chest. At ninety-three his body had quit. That is the image that haunts my memories of him.

I told her that while there is always that yearning to have one more chance to tell a loved one how much they mean to you; when I think of her mother now what I'll be able to remember is that wry smile and quietly wicked sense of humor.

We sometimes did not quite see eye to eye, but I cared very much for her. For one thing, it is because of her, and her husband, that my life has been complete for the last twenty-seven years.




冬枯れの道二筋に分かれけれ

The desolation of winter/The road through/Divides into two.