sixty-five

my mom would have turned sixty-five yesterday. the best way to honor her would've been to spend a productive day working hard, eating healthy meals, maybe putting on some lipstick and standing up straighter. then toasting her in the evening with a sip of ume-shu (sweet plum wine) – only a sip! but i felt sort of preoccupied and didn't get as much done as i could have.

when her sister and oldest brother came to SB for her funeral, they asked if we could find some of her hair in a hairbrush, or maybe even nail clippings somewhere? impossible – she was so neat that she never left hair in her brush. since my mother insisted on being buried in california, all they wanted was to take some bit of her back with them to japan. in the end, we found a tiny glass pot filled with bobby pins and small hair clips; they bent over the pins and clips together, reading glasses on, and tweezered out the wispy gray and white strands of my mother's short, baby-soft hair that had grown back after her last round of chemo.

so now, as my brother showed me photos of on his digital camera, there's a little monolith in the family cemetery, marking the place where they buried the wisps of my mother that they carried over the ocean from our faraway coast. i'm glad there's a bit of her here; though i don't feel the need to travel to that place, it's comforting to know we're both here, and that her family has that place to go, to wash the headstone, burn incense, visit.

at home last night i wrote her a letter, and then after having sat with the words for awhile, as the evening breeze wafted in, i burned the paper and released the words. words on paper now gone, as her physical being is also gone, but sent off with the hope that the spirits of both have met somewhere.