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.

Mom and the bam bao birth

There should be a rule about mothers. They should never be allowed to grow old. They should stay the age that they were when you needed them most, forever. They should stay vigorous, active, alert, fast, have eyes in the backs of their heads and the ability to take you out of the world they brought you into forever and ever, ad vitam aeternum.

Most especially, they should not be a reminder that all things pass.

Even mothers.

Every year Mom comes to visit around the weekend of July 4th, one of two annual visits that we exchange: her to California in summer, us to Seattle in winter. In her case it's work-related; she teaches at a summer Suzuki institute in Santa Rosa each year, and comes early (or stays late, depending on her schedule) so she can spend some time with us. Usually it's a matter of a day or so, before she dashes off again to pick up her own life. This time she spent the entire weekend with us, from Friday afternoon to Monday morning.

It was a productive weekend, if a little heavy on the nostalgia side. One of the late blooming side effects of pregnancy, besides the weight gain, is that hormones that have hitherto been a thing that mostly happened to other people have been catching up on lost opportunities. It would not be too much to say that I am turning into a girl, with all the irrational mood swings that accompany said stereotype. Despite my alarming tendency to burst into tears at the drop of a hat, we actually managed to get quite a bit done: things on my Denial List, which was seriously starting to grow to embarrassing proportions.

The long title for my Denial List is "Things I Should Be Doing to Prepare for The Baby's Arrival," and includes such practical things as, "find out about maternity leave" and "get a crib." The list is heavy with practicalities, all of which seem far too closely related to real life and maturity to inspire me to action. To date I have been procrastinating based on rationales that contain at least a kernel of logic to them. I will be 35 years old when Filbert¹ is born. I am a diabetic having her first child. The number of things that could go wrong with this pregnancy, especially given all the difficulties inherent in getting pregnant to begin with, have been of a variety that have left me reluctant to grow emotionally attached to the end product.

Except now I'm in the third trimester, the baby is as frisky as a cocker spaniel with a mouth full of peanut butter, and it's getting impossible not to think of him as a little person. Who kicks. And stretches. And really, really liked Iron Man.

I am, despite myself, emotionally attached. Go figure.

One of the greatest things about this experience has been how excited Mom has been, a far cry from how enthused she was about the notion of grandchildren a couple of years ago.

"If you have children," she said cautiously, "remember that I am very very old, so I will not be able to help."

...which, in its turn, was slightly better than her original interested reaction to a comment that I wanted to have children one day. "Are you sure?" she said, then. There was frank perplexity in her voice, as I recall; the same note that was in her voice when she used to ask me why I had decided to fall down the stairs. "Really? You and your husband?" And unspoken but implied: Why?

Nowadays she's fascinated by everything. 34 years after she had me, it's all new again. She's delighted by the prenatal books, and the little articles about the development of the fetus. "They didn't have these when I was pregnant," she said a little wistfully when we were going through What to Expect When You Are Expecting and looking at the descriptions: week 27! week 28! Maternal instincts -- hers, more than mine -- have kicked in with a vengeance, resurrected from some place of hibernation that she'd regretfully shoved them when we'd grown old enough to fend for ourselves. I put her hand on my stomach one night while Filbert was doing the salsa in there, and she felt him kick. Her face lit up in a way I haven't seen in a long time.

And the stories.

Becoming pregnant has caused me to cross some invisible bar of maturity in her mind. The commonality of experience (even if it is just a biological function spaced three decades apart) has opened up a treasure trove of stories that she has never shared before. Stories about her pregnancy. Stories about Tomoko, the little sister who she miscarried between me and Sako. Stories about our childhoods. Stories about her own childhood. Marvelous, tragic, hilarious little stories.

"You will see," she prophesied darkly, "if you have a child just like you--"

"My children are just like my sister," Tara said. We were over at her house for a July 4th barbeque, and she was clearing the table with one hand and juggling her youngest daughter with the other. "And my sister Rachel's children are just like my other sister, Melissa."

"Oh," said Mom. "In that case, you will be just fine."

I'm not sure what to make of that.

"I went into labor with you because I was making ham bao," she informed me, after getting into a little tussle with me over her suitcase. During her entire stay, if she saw me about to pick up anything that looked bigger than my purse, she'd immediately rush over and bully it out of my hands. The doctor's recommendation is that I not lift anything greater than 20 pounds. My mother's personal opinion appeared to be that 5 pounds would lead to immediate and devastating repercussions.

"I don't see what ham bao has to do with anything."

"I got the recipe from a very nice Filipino woman," she said wistfully, and bulldozed over me with the suitcase. Passersby who caught sight of us in the parking lot looked torn between disapproving and approving. When one watches a pregnant woman let the senior citizen twig of her mother load suitcases into the back of an SUV, I imagine it's a little hard to tell where the moral high ground should lie. On the whole, public sentiment appeared to lean towards sympathy with my mother and outrage over my apparent apathy.

"I remember those bao," I said.

"I was making the dough," she said, and demonstrated, raising her hands high over her head and letting them drop again with sound effects. "Bam," she said. "Bam, bam, bam."

"That doesn't look like kneading."

'Kneading' is not in the Japanese vocabulary. She looked blank, and said again, "Bam. I was making the dough. It was too heavy," she said. "My water broke. I went into labor early, for 36 hours."

In all my 34 years, she has never told me anything about her labor. I've been under the impression that most mothers mention it at some point during their child's career: I was in labor 9 hours with you, for instance. As a lever for guilt-inducing emotional blackmail, it's like shooting fish in a barrel -- far too easy for my mother, as it happens. She is an artist. She's never mentioned it before.

"Thirty-six hours," I said, taken aback. And out of some obscure sense of extremely belated guilt: "Sorry."

"It was the bao," she said charitably, and looked regretful. "That was a good recipe."

I made scrambled eggs for breakfast. I made a lot of scrambled eggs. Mom moved hers around her plate with blinking fascination, then carefully sectioned off 2/3rds of her portion and relocated it to my plate.

"You make so many," she said reproachfully.

"Um," I said. "Sorry. I thought the Guy was going to eat." He was already holed up downstairs in his office, doing -- who knows what. Desperately cleaning before his mother-in-law caught sight of the room? Maybe.

"When I was growing up, I used to dream about eggs," Mom commented in Japanese, doing something delicate and deliberate with a wedge of toast and her fork. "I used to want an egg so much. So very much."

Mom doesn't talk much about her childhood, except in the vaguest of references. We know, for instance, that she was in Manchuria as an infant, because we have a black and white picture of her in a little backpack being hauled around by my almost-as-tiny grandmother. We know she grew up during the latter part of and the post-apocalyptic fallout of World War II, because she is old enough, and displays all the terrifyingly frugal habits of a wartime child. Actual anecdotes are rare and far between, however. Whereas Dad liked to drag out every little snippet and story from the past, some of them even truthful, to entertain the masses, she (like Sako) has never been a big storyteller.

"Eggs," I prompted hopefully. "Didn't you have any?" Her family home in Japan is a farm. They have goats and chickens and small green frogs. The first two are domesticated. The last come and go as the whim takes them. Only one of those sets of animals make eggs people eat.

"Well," she said. "O-obachama (great-grandmother) was part of the branch family, but she had many children, and of course she preferred them. So every day in their obento (lunches) they would each have an egg, and by the time all of their lunches had an egg and the older boys had an egg and the older girls had an egg there would be no more eggs left. I would look at my lunch and see just rice, no egg, and be very sad and think, "I want an egg." But there were never any eggs."

She moved her food around on her plate again and added, "I came to the United States and I was wild about eggs. Your great-aunt Kanae, she also went wild about...." She trailed off and looked thoughtful. "Cream-puffs."

I started to laugh. Mom chewed meditatively on a mouthful of eggs and toast and looked rapt.

"Your sister," Mom said, with that special emphasis on the last word that was all about exasperated, pleasant nostalgia.

"She was a quiet kid," I told the Guy, who looked remarkably unsurprised.

"--Because Yuhri would never stop talking," Mom added in Engrish, "so she never had a chance to say anything."

Again, the Guy looked remarkably unsurprised.

"I talked a lot."

I distinctly heard the Guy mutter, "Talk."

"We lost her one day," Mom continued, still in Engrish (here translated to English because the grammar gods weep) "and then we found her on top of the refrigerator. Nobody could understand how she had climbed up there. She was only eighteen months old, I think? There was no way she could climb, the cabinet was too low from the refrigerator and it was too far from the ground -- but she was there, on top of the refrigerator."

"She started early," commented the Guy.

"Oh my God," I added, and immediately started viewing every high surface in our house in a totally new and appalling light.

Mom looked complacent. "It would be good if your baby is like Masako," she said, because she is innately cruel, and then chuckled happily to herself.

1. Filbert is not the child's real name. At least, I hope not. We've simply taken to calling him Filbert because -- something to do with nuts, which I don't really understand, but the Guy started it and much as I loathe the name it has somehow managed to stick. This being one of the few occasions that the Guy has managed to slip one by me, I will let it pass for now.