The Move
:: Mar 31, 11:13 PM

It was only two days before my dad died that I thought he would actually die. Even so, I didn’t know what “die” meant. As his daughter, I thought he was Superman – invincible. No matter how much he tried to save me, save himself, save my world, he would persevere… and drink to it. Of course he wasn’t moral like Superman. His heart was the big but he loved money and women (three wives). His life wasn’t as dramatic as the dad’s on Six Feet Under and Brothers and Sisters though. Nothing crazy was uncovered after his death. I never even found the photos that wife #3 called me sobbing about one day about six months before his death.

That story went like this. A few months before my dad died #3 called my cell phone while I was cleaning my room. She was home alone because my dad was hospitalized at the time. It was about the fourth time he had been hospitalized, I can’t remember exactly how many times he was admitted at this point. She called sobbing “Yoko, I found these pictures of your father with his second wife. They are horrible. They are dirty. I can’t believe she made him do this! I wan’t to vomit. She is an evil woman! Evil! Their poor daughter!” She was hysterical and I didn’t know what to say. There, there #3, my dad didn’t mean it. Let me console you. He’s not that perverted. In fact, I didn’t know what the contents of the photographs in question were. Were they eating steak off of each other? Were they fondling each other’s sensitive parts in a new and creative way? But more importantly: Didn’t #3 have any friends to call? I wanted to say “Sorry #3 I am not interested in this discussion. Please call, hang up and dial another number.”

So when he died and #3 left their house, there were still some knick knacks left in the house. I never forgot that phone call she gave me and I thought that maybe she would leave those photos for the designated clean-up person (me) to discover after she moved out. I never found them for which I am totally relieved. I would probably have vomited as well. The only incriminated thing I found was a VHS tape labeled “XXX Girls.” That was straight forward enough and I know any guy has their stash of porn. Even so, my reaction to that tape was to rip off the label throw it in a trash can and throw the tape itself in another trash can after bashing it a little and ripping out about a foot or two of tape. I wasn’t bothered, but I never wanted my poor grandma, who lives downstairs from him, to see it.

My dad had turned 55, four months before he passed away and there was no way my 21st century brain could believe that modern medicine would let a 55-year-old man die. Not only that, but it was because he was someone who gave me life. If a person who gave you life dies, a part of you dies as well. It’s a cliché, but it’s true.
My dad never took anything back when he spoke. He was clear about what he thought and never flip-flopped. That’s why, even though he wanted to become the Prime Minister of Japan, he would have made a terrible politician. I heard of this dream of his early in my life, during the 80s, when everyone and their mama thought that they could take over the world with all the wealth and gold hoop earrings swirling around.

Like everything, he never took this dream back either, but he also never seriously pursued it. I still believe he could have some how pulled it off and made it to the party as a candidate though. He could have done an Obama, and given a rousing speech only two years before he would ultimate stand at the highest mountaintop of the land of the Rising Sun. I would have campaigned like a mad-person for him even if he fit himself into the Liberal Democratic Party (Japan’s right wing party). I would have proposed the campaign slogan “Wake up Japan!”

It was a shock to me when the nurses were moving my dad from a multi-person room to a single-person room approximately 48 hours before his death. His loved-ones, me included, wanted him to move into a single-person room week before, but until the end he was so keen on saving money that he stayed in the multi-person room which cost a fraction of the single-person room at 50,000 yen. The only reason why he spend the last two days in a single-person room was because he no longer had the energy to penny-pinch. But I know that in the moment he entered consciousness he thought to himself “50,000 per day… this is going to add up.”

This move, the meaning of a multi-purpose room to a single-person room was something that never occurred to me as a healthy person who hadn’t experienced death in any sort of proximity – near or far. I had no proximity to the Big D. Desipite the absence of D so far, without being told, I knew this move was about the Big D. There are many signs, or what they call in literature “foreshadowing” for us healthy folks to get ready for death. The hospital knows them out of necessity. So when I saw them moving everything – the toothbrush he was no longer able to use, the one pair of spare PJs in the barren steel cabinet closet, his glasses – I knew it.

Unlike birth, where workers are bustling about, death is something hospitals think should be done in private. I second that idea. Out of respect for other patients and for loved ones of the close-to-death patient. So although I absolutely felt sick, like I wanted to flush all the fluids out of myself, when I discovered the move, I knew why it had to be done. He would die. And to die, you need space.

written in Beijing on March 31, 2009