AFTERSHOCKS
1.
The ground shook four or five times a day.
The circular fluorescent light above the kitchen table would begin to judder and sway, and then the floor would pitch gently for about half a minute.
"How big was that one?"
Suddenly, Lana and Sebastian trusted in me as a seismologist.
"That was a 3."
They were pretty much all 3s.
Oh, I might have thrown in a couple of 4s here and there, just for the sake of my credibility. But mostly they were 3s...
We were in Japan for the funeral of my father-in-law, who had passed away on March 17.
2.
My own father died when I was 12.
I don't recall the last time that I saw him. One day in the spring he left for the hospital, and he just never came back.
I didn't visit him while he was in the hospital. He was in an advanced cirrhotic state, and I suppose my family thought it was better if I didn't see him like that. Not sure who made that choice. Maybe he did.
I didn't attend the funeral, either. It was held in late May, and I ended that school year with perfect attendance.
3.
We arrived at the apartment, and I pulled off my sneakers. We were all tired from the flight, and the kids and I were ready to crash in the tatami room.
As we made our way down the short hallway to the room, something caught the corner of my eye. It was my father-in-law's body, which was laid out in the tatami room under a thick blue and white futon. His face was covered by a handkerchief.
Taeko led us into the room, and she kneeled down to remove the covering from his face. I felt myself retreating.
We started to discuss sleeping arrangements for the night, and I was troubled by the idea of spending the night in the small apartment with the body.
“Maybe the kids can sleep at your brothers. I can go with them.”
But I didn't press the issue.
And as the evening went on, I began to get more comfortable. I realized that my father-in-law was giving me a gift.
It was the gift of learning how to say goodbye.
4.
The next day, the mortician came to the house and prepared the body to be moved. He brought a simple white casket made of pressed wood, with hinged flaps that opened to expose my father-in-law's face. When the body was placed in the casket, it was covered from the neck down by a board that was designed to look like a suit. Which is a very practical vestment for a cremation...
My family chanted over the casket for a few minutes, and then the mortician and his assistant carried the box outside and lifted it into a Toyota Crown hearse. We all faced the car and bowed as it pulled away, and we said thank you to my father-in-law.
“Arigato, ojichan.”
5.
The wake was a simple and moving ceremony.
The family sat at the front of the room, and two-by-two we stood up to face the mourners. Taeko and I went together-- we bowed to thank everyone for coming, then turned and faced my father-in-law at the front of the hall. There were two small boxes on a table, and each box contained a pile of ground incense on one side and a burning silver ember on the other. We grabbed a pinch of incense, lifted it to our foreheads, and then placed it on the ember.
We repeated this rite three times, and then said a quick, silent prayer. Lana later told me that I “did a good job pretending to be Buddhist”...
When we had finished that segment, the mourners began to come up in twos and threes to another table that contained the same type of incense boxes. We bowed to each group from our chairs, and they went on to perform the same basic ritual that we had performed earlier. Their prayers completed, we bowed to them again.
It all felt so much like a funeral that I wondered what the next day would bring.
6.
The initial part of the funeral was indeed very much like the wake. But when the prayers and chanting were over, three or four employees of the funeral home began to break down the area surrounding my father-in-law's casket. Then they placed a couple of metal stands in the center of the room, about 5 feet apart. They moved the casket onto these stands, and slid off the lid.
We gathered around my father-in-law, and the mortician brought in a plate of succulent green sprigs. We each grabbed a small handful and placed them in the casket. This was followed by multiple trays of flowers, which we spread around as well. By the time we were finished, the interior of the casket was dazzlingly bright, and exuded a sweet, floral perfume.
The casket was covered again, and I joined my nephews and some of Taeko's cousins as we carried it out of the hall and placed it on a large gurney. A procession of mourners followed the gurney to the crematorium, where the casket was wheeled into an oven. The steel doors of the oven were then sealed shut, and we heard the muted whoosh of fire.
7.
We were whisked to a long, narrow room for lunch.
Bento boxes with colorful block letters for the kids: A is for Apple, B is for Banana, and the like. Larger blue sets decorated with white flowers for the adults.
Taeko reached into her bag and handed me an onion bagel sealed in a Ziploc.
8.
After about an hour, the door opened, and we were led out, back to the crematorium. We gathered in an anteroom while Taeko, her mother, and her brother went into a large reception area. The kids and I craned our necks and looked around corners in an effort to see what they were doing.
One of the assistants came around with a bucket containing large chopsticks-- they were the size of drumsticks, and the tips were darkened with ash. We were each encouraged to take two. I rolled them around in my hand, and tried to grip them like regular chopsticks. But they were too big for that.
When we entered the reception hall, we found the burnt remains of the casket, intermingled with my father-in-law's ashes and his deep white bones. Working in pairs, we chose a bone from the skeletal array and picked it up with our chopsticks. If my sketchy knowledge of human anatomy is correct, my partner and I selected his right ulna.
We all placed the bones in a small white box.
9.
It was a beautiful ritual.
If you had asked me in the cold light of a previous day how I might have felt about such an experience, I can't honestly say I would have embraced it. I might have been concerned about how it would affect the kids. I might have been concerned about how it would affect me.
But in the moment, I felt connected to something real and profound. It felt fittingly similar to the experience of witnessing Lana's birth.
10.
I sat in the passenger's seat on the drive home, with the box of my father-in-law's bones warming my lap.
Arigato, ojichan.
11.
We did not feel a single aftershock during our last two days in Japan.
