Mourning My Mother

My mother passed away on January 13.

I can't believe that

my mother passed away less than two years after my father's death.

I'm still in sadness and confusion.

r.i.p

When I was about four and my father was still starting out as an ink painter, we lived in staff housing at a certain “facility” near Chuo University.

Nearly everyone there used a wheelchair. The place felt cut off from the world, deep in the hills, and that little enclave became the first landscape I knew.

Bereavement leave opened up this sudden stretch of empty time, so I took Petit, my dog, for a walk. Maybe he sensed something. He was in no hurry to go home.

I picked him up and set off to retrace the little mountain path I’d walked as a child, from the facility to the nearest shopping street.

I remembered a rainy day when a huge toad blocked the path and my mother and I stood there shivering.

Actually, that was why I’d come all this way. I’d remembered that scene, and I just had to walk the path again.

“You remember things from so long ago, Yugo,” my mother used to say. She was right.

That landscape of my childhood had been cleared away. All that was left was a vacant lot buried in dead grass.

My mother passed away on January 13.

My parents were close and always together. Less than two years after my father died, she went to join him. How could it have happened so soon?

I still can’t believe it. I’m confused, heartbroken, and full of regret.

I had thought my mother was stronger than that.

She was actually better at getting her work noticed than my father, the ink painter.

A collection of poems she published herself got people talking and was eventually picked up by a publisher. Newspapers came out several times to cover the herb garden she’d carved out of a small plot.

She had so much energy that I thought she’d find some dramatic way to get through even my father’s death, pull us all into some new venture, and carry on for years to come.

I loved the herb garden my mother made.

It was so small you could fit the whole thing into a single Instagram shot. Even in the middle of this loss, thinking back to the times we all gathered there for tea still warms me a little.

But after seeing my father through to the end, my mother gave up the garden and her herb classes altogether.

She’d still say dreamy, peculiar things now and then, like how she’d publish another book when she turned ninety or become an “apprentice witch” so she could grow old in style. But I suppose the world she’d felt so sure of had depended on having my father beside her.

Around the first anniversary of his death, to borrow my brother Shogo’s words, it was “as if the spell had broken.” Illness swept her away.

“Hey, could you look after Petit again after all?”

She asked me when I went back to the family home to spend New Year’s Eve together.

I was dozing on the sofa with Petit tucked against my chest. My mother scratched my head and asked in a faint voice, as if she’d finally made up her mind.

She’d spent about two months in hospital the previous autumn and had seemed to be getting better, but she told me that looking after the dog was still a bit much. She wanted me to take him in again, like I had while she was in hospital.

“Really? But won’t you be lonely without Petit? Are you sure?”

That turned out to be the last conversation I had with my mother in person.

So she wouldn’t feel lonely, I decided to turn an old iPhone into a pet camera so she could watch Petit live while he was with me. My mother wasn’t much good with computers, but my brother had been keeping in touch with her by email. He told me he’d stopped hearing from her. When I went to check on her, the house was pitch-dark. My mother was already cold.

What if I hadn’t taken her at her word and brought only Petit home? What if I’d brought her with me too? Would things have turned out differently?

That regret just keeps going round and round and round in my head.

Having seen my father through to the end two years ago, I know there’s no getting away from this loop in my head. I’m braced for it.

The shock of finding my mother cold, the regret, the remorse, the gratitude. It’s a lot to hold all at once. Maybe going over it again and again is how the heart learns to hold it.

For the past two weeks I’ve canceled everything. All I’ve done is deal with paperwork and walk Petit.

Watching Petit insist on getting his own way, I often think anyone raised by my mother would turn out like this. Thanks to her, we grew up sensitive and honest about what we love!

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“You remember things from so long ago, Yugo,” my mother used to say. She was right.

Even when I’m a hundred and today is a long time ago, I’ll remember the herb garden she made as vividly as ever. And I’ll grow into the sort of wonderful old person she meant to become.

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Thank you for everything, Mom.

May you rest peacefully with Dad.