My mom sent our daughter a Valentine’s Day card this year, in which she instructed her granddaughter to hug Mommy, Daddy, and Baby Brother on her behalf. Reika thought about this for while, and then made a counterproposal: “I’ll hug Mommy and we’ll let Kei hug Daddy. How’s that?”
It certainly didn’t take her long to realize the value of a younger sibling when it comes to distributing chores!
My wife’s grandmother passed away last week, after a long battle with cancer. She died just a few days before what would have been her 81st birthday. With the exception of our infant son, who never had the chance to meet her, we were all very close to her, so her passing was a sad event for our family. Even though this moment had been all but inevitable for nearly a year, the suddenness of it came as a great shock to us all.
Our daughter, who knew her great-grandmother only by the nickname “Enko-enko” (babytalk for “let’s go for a walk,” which is what they used to do together before her illness got really bad), has had a difficult coming to grips with what this news means. Having never experienced death before, she’s exhibited a very innocent and genuine (though not always well-mannered) interest in the details. The sight of her at the funeral, with her little hands clasped together, obediently following along with prayers she didn’t understand (neither did I, for that matter—Buddhist prayers are quite beyond the range of my Japanese ability), was one of the most precious things I’ve seen in all the time I’ve known her—although, given the circumstances, it’s not something I’m in any hurry to see again.
In talking with my wife after the funeral, we thought a bit about what we wanted for our own funerals. My wife seems ambivalent. She doesn’t want an expensive funeral, but outside of that, she has no opinion. I thought it would be fitting to be returned to Albuquerque, where I was born, but haven’t given it much thought beyond that. (Have interesting plans for your body after you die? In the comments section, feel free to tell us how you would like to have your remains handled. What a topic for discussion, huh?!)
At one point, though, she mentioned the expression about “having a hole in one’s heart” after a loved one dies. Unsurprisingly, there is a similar expression in Japanese. Given the universal nature of the experience, I’m sure there must be a similar expression in nearly every language. I certainly felt that hole during the ceremony—and I’m sure it must be an enormous hole for my wife, who was practically raised by her grandmother. Unfortunately for us, though, only the hole remains now. Enko-enko is gone.
First time for last rites
Although I’ve attended a number of funerals in Japan before, yesterday was the first time I had ever attended a cremation. I don’t think my Western upbringing adequately prepared me for the experience. Most Christian funerals, of course, end with the body being carried to its final resting place and then buried, but in Japan the surviving family members take turns picking up the cremated bones of the deceased with special chopsticks and putting them into an urn, a process that left me rather choked up.
As a rule, the Japanese cremate their dead (there’s no room in this tiny country for big, Western-style cemeteries!), with the Imperial Family being the only exception. If our family ends up staying in Japan, our children may one day be doing that with our bones. With that in mind, Albuquerque is starting to seem like a much better idea.
I’ve just been informed that our daughter has been admitted to the hospital for pneumonia. She’ll be there for a week, which means she’ll miss Mommy and Kei’s homecoming by several days.
This really upsets me because it should never have happened. This is almost entirely the fault of Japan’s socialized medical system (and its pernicious belief in the infallibility of doctors, but I’ll follow up on that later).
Our daughter went to see a doctor last week for a slight cold, but the girl behind her in the waiting room was to be treated for pneumonia. Why Japanese hospitals don’t have an appointment system is quite beyond me, but putting a bunch of sick kids in the same room and having them wait their turn to see the doctor (a wait that often lasts for hours, as it did in this particular case) is just begging for them to share germs. At the very least, I don’t see why the patient with pneumonia’s case couldn’t be placed at the very top of the pile, so that she could be dealt with before spreading her illness to others. But no, that’s not how Japanese hospitals work.
So what should have been a simple visit to get some medicine for a cold has evolved into a one-week hospitalization for full-blown pneumonia.
At least we can be thankful that this was diagnosed before the baby came home, I guess.
This afternoon my wife informed me that our baby is due to be delivered on November 7, not November 20 as originally expected. It seems that we are now only two weeks away from welcoming a new member into our family. Naturally, we’re pretty excited about this. Perhaps no one is more so than my wife, who has been very eager to get her body back.
I hope to be able to make pictures available to family and friends who want them. I have also arranged to borrow a digital video camera for a few weeks, so a video may be available. Babies tend to sleep a lot, which doesn’t make for very interesting footage, but we’ll see how it goes.
Watch this space for more info. If you would like to be among the first to know when the baby is born, feel free to sign up for our friends and family mailing list.
This is probably the last chance to suggest baby names. Although our short list for first names is pretty much finalized at this point, we have yet to settle on a list of middle names, so feel free to make suggestions in the comments section (unless you were thinking of suggesting “UltraBaby,” in which case you should probably keep your ideas to yourself). Our plan is for the baby to have a Japanese first name and an “American” (English?) middle name, if that helps at all.
When my wife and daughter came home from their vacation in Sasebo last week (which included a visit to the Huis ten Bosch amusement park), they brought back a treat for me, an assortment of European beers.
Although I don’t drink much, I do like a good beer every once in a while. When it comes to beer, the Belgians have a pretty good sense of what’s good and what’s not, so my wife knows that I have developed a fondness for Belgian beer.
She also knows where I stand politically, which made her selection that much more ironic. Upon coming home from work at the end of a long and exhausting week, what man expects to be greeted with a tempting beer with such an antithetical label?
“If you want to drink the others,” she told me, “you have to drink this one first.” Do you think she’s trying to tell me something?
Check out the World Beers site for an interesting selection of imported beers available in Japan. (The site is in Japanese, of course.)
This is the weblog of an American expat in Japan, a father of two, a loving husband, an armchair political wonk, an inveterate geek, and an all-around garden-variety fool.
