i know dead people

The beginning of July was not a good time, though I remain a little ambivalent on whether it is accurate to call it a bad time, necessarily. Mom's visit went a long way to brightening what was, until then, a month of unrelenting weirdness.

The Guy called me from home to inform me that my mom had left a message on the answering machine. Aunt Rumi had passed away. She was dad's younger sister and had been suffering from terminal lung cancer for several months now. The Hirata side of the family has never been large, always excepting my other aunt Michi's clan of robust half-Irish sons and their assorted offspring. There was really nobody left on the Hirata side of the family in Japan except for Rumi; Mom and Aunt Michi had both been keeping in touch with her on a regular basis, with the occasional home visit by my mom's sister.

"She died on her birthday," Mom said on the answering machine, with that determinedly buoyant lilt to her voice that always comes out when she's passing on bad news. "Isn't that mysterious?"

She finds meaning in the loosest of coincidences.

That was Monday.

On Tuesday we found out that one of our coworkers had been hit by a train and died.

To say that I approached Wednesday with deep suspicion would be understating the case.

It was a slightly tumultuous week, which is a bit like saying that Hurricane Katrina was a bit of weather, but it was survivable for me at least, which is one better than at least two people managed. My apologies for the morbid humor, but it seems called for; death is rare enough, but when it strikes like lightning twice on the same day, it seems like either a cosmic joke or (for the paranoid) a milestone en route to some extremely unpleasant ultimate payoff. We are all dying, but to lose two people in one day seems -- in the words of Oscar Wilde -- like carelessness.

It is possible to be flippant. My people (in the familial sense, rather than the racial) deal well with death. We have a very intricate fantasy that supports and even augments an extremely sturdy edifice of denial.

I have very little to say about my coworker, who was a small, charming woman whose personality was somewhat lost in the shadow of more rambunctious colleagues. I had very little time to get to know her, in the grand scheme of things; the others in the company who had been working with her longer tell me that she was, before I knew her, one of the lights of the office. I liked what I knew of her, without being an intimate. Her funeral will be in Colma, a town between my workplace and San Francisco. All I know about Colma is that someone once wrote a musical about it. It apparently consists primarily of funeral homes and car dealerships, which I find charmingly cynical. I understand the conjunction of rental car agencies and the gas stations that seem to sprout up like mushrooms on the next corner, but Colma seems to have a blacker view of cause and effect than most.

I have more to say on the subject of my Aunt Rumi, who was the black sheep of the Hirata family. It would not be stretching to say that the Hirata blood has grown a bit thin over the last few generations, sprouting weak branches with the exception of my Aunt Michi's. Small island and blue blood leads to a certain level of inbreeding that no amount of denial can erase; my mother's blood, hearty stock, was a sorely needed transfusion. From all accounts, my grandfather was a martinet, though not one who held the moral high ground. I have no idea whether he'd be any better off in modern-day Japan, but in those days his activities were par for the course, culturally speaking; nowadays, at least in the U.S., Eyebrows Would Be Raised. The more I hear about previous generations, the more I realize just how much standards have changed -- maybe for the better, maybe not. It's all very well and good to be an upstanding citizen who regularly drinks and drives if one is alive and kicking in the 1920s, for instance, but modern morality frowns on it. Not that I'm sure that my grandfather ever performed that particular act, though I remember my father being quite pissy in the car one day and getting increasingly drunk on the way to my Aunt Rumi's wedding. It was, rest assured, before drinking and driving was codified as a bad thing, and in any case, though I never quite grasped the circumstances (being quite young at the time) I continue vaguely certain that in the particular instance described, the wedding was actually a badder thing than the drinking and the driving.

I remember Mom didn't approve, though I'm still not sure about which: the wedding, the drunk driving, or the bad manners that would result in my father showing up to his sister's wedding flying higher than a kite. I remember very little about the wedding itself. For that matter, I remember nothing about her husband. Husbands, plural. There was one I recall vaguely as Kingyo, which can't be right since that means "goldfish" in Japanese. I suspect that's an issue with childish mispronunciation rather than commentary on his personality or looks.

Rumi lived a seamier life than my father or Aunt Michi. She lived large, or seemed to live large when we knew her as kids; I remember her as being flamboyant and flashy, and admired her dreadfully. If you can imagine a Japanese New Jersey girl, that was my Aunt Rumi. Large earrings, leopard prints and form-fitting outfits were the order of the day with her, and heavy makeup that we thought was glamorous, given we tended not to see any on the women we encountered. She swooped in at random intervals, then swooped out again on a surf of beer foam and cigarette ash, back to whatever she was up to in Japan.

She drank, she smoked, she gambled, and in the end she lost a lot. At some point during my childhood, she quarreled with my dad -- not an impossibly difficult thing to do for family, who have a talent for pushing one's buttons -- over something fairly significant. Gambling, I think, though I don't know the details. They didn't speak for years.

"Tell me a Rumi story," I said.

"Oh, no," said Mom, with great exasperation. I think it was directed at me. She does not air dirty laundry with her children.

Things grow hazy after that. At some point there was a reconciliation, probably related to the fact that my father was dying, or had actually died. My mother's influence, I suspect. She has always been the outstretched hand in family squabbles, whatever their reason. Rumi, perhaps due to the gambling, ended up destitute; my mother quietly sent her money from an income that couldn't afford to spare it. Sako, who found out about it later, was furious at Rumi and holds a grudge to this day; she is made of less forgiving stuff, much like my father.

"Well," said Mom, and stopped there. Nothing more: just, "Well." In that one word she said a multitude of things. "It's none of Sako's business what I do with my money," was one. "Rumi is family," was another. "Your father would want to take care of her," was the last, and out of all of these things, only two were true.

Mom is, in her own gentle way, as implacable and relentless as a tsunami.

Her sister is just as bad. Between the two of them they redeemed my aunt, in a quaint, old-fashioned way that built up a quiet support system that eventually fished Rumi out of the troughs. It may be that she was tired of her lifestyle already, or was worn down by the drip-drip-drip of persistent salvation. Who knows. I imagine being the focus of their attention was like being chased by the pit bull belonging to Death and Taxes; Mom is two states away, and she still gnaws straight to the bone. When Rumi died, it was with Aunt Hideko -- no relation to her, being her sister-in-law's sister -- looking after her affairs.

I found out later that Rumi had left debts behind her. A great deal of debt. Debt that my mother took out a loan for, and paid.

"You did what?"

"Yuuuuuuhri," Mom said. She has a touching faith in the power of the vowel, being convinced that if she drags it out long enough, its end will meet its beginning and cause a temporal loop that will erase the last few seconds from the target person's memory. True, she has yet to make this theory work, but she remains ever hopeful. "Yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhri."

"I'll send some money. How much did you borrow?"

"Hm?"

"How much?"

"I cannot hear you. Hallo? Hallo?"

"How much money?!"

Mom was disappointed. Time was still linear. "Oh," she said. "I have to go now. I will talk to you later, Yuhri."

"...Oh no you don't," I said.

"Bye-bye!" she caroled brightly. And then she hung up.

She dodged the question for three weeks, though "dodge" suggests that she cleverly managed not to be asked the question at all. What she did was more like yogurt stonewalling. Conversations on the phone during that period, and there were many, took on an, 'I'm rubber and you're glue,' quality.

"How much?"

"Oh, well."

"Which means how much, exactly?"

"A little bit."

"So little you had to take out a loan?"

"I forget. I am a very old woman," Mom said reproachfully. "I do not remember things so very well."

"How much?"

"This cannot be good for your baby. Do you eat enough green? Do you eat okra?"

There are raving lunatics in asylums who make more sense when my mother digs in her heels.

I have nothing profound to say about my Aunt Rumi. She was distant in the latter part of my life, simply a name that my sister didn't like to hear, but her death is one more tie severed between Dad and me, another link lost. There are very few of them left, and each one of those are tenuous with age.

My mother and Aunt Michi are heading to Japan in November to pick up the ashes. Aunt Hideko is making all the arrangements for the cremation. Death has trotted through the neighborhood and then moved on, taking a little family drama with it. The ancestor ceremony, when Aunt Rumi's tablet is enshrined in the ancestor altar, is on August 15, and I'll be flying up there with my checkbook. She can hang up the phone when I'm in California, but it's harder to dodge me when I'm in the same house.