loss of a parent [not mine]

if we have had a conversation about first memories then this is not a new story for you. but my take on it has evolved so maybe i can preserve a bit of your interest.

what i actually think i remember - which is distilled and diluted through 40+ years of telling, re-telling, re-membering, hearing my mom's version... is really a series of fleeting but haunting images, smells, and sounds.

this whole project obviously has me rethinking how we arrive at and wade through loss. and in the middle of that night when this was all born i couldn't help but think - my first memory is a loss. not mine. not one whose complexity i understood at all when it happened. but a loss nonetheless.

i was 2-ish. my mother and i had flown to japan to go to her mother's funeral. i don't remember this clearly, but apparently we had to run thru the airport. i do sort of have this vague hazy image of a green/blue small tiled striped hallway at LAX [maybe it was another airport]. but i think that is my mom's part of the story. we were running to make up for lost time. [aka we were late].

i do remember her in a black kimono. with a white crest [similar to wisteria one above]. i do remember her being so very very sad. i remember tears [i do not remember tears from my mother too often]. i remember a smell [i think it's tatami. tatami to me is the essence of a japanese smell. there's also a japanese wood smell. i don't know what kind of wood it is. it's kind of like an incense. it's not overpowering. sometimes when you get something from japan when you first open it you smell this smell i'm trying so poorly to describe. my mom tends to look at me sideways when i smell things and say it smells like japan]. i remember a buddhist monk sitting in a middle of a room. chanting. we all sat around him. i thought the chanting would never end. i remember knowing that i should be quiet and not fidget. i don't know if i pulled that off. i think i felt the importance of this ritual... i think i felt the loss in the room. [but had no vocabulary or no real way to express that].

when i think about this now. i think about my mom. then 27-ish. who had moved away, so very far away, from her home to be with my dad. to start a different life. who had a young child. who then didn't have her mother. if i imagine my own life without my mother when my child was small.... my eyes swell and my heart starts to beat faster and my brain darts from fear to denial to relief that wasn't my path. or my daughter's.

i could speak to the loss of not having that grandmother. i wonder how my life might have been influenced by her.

but really i slide into the time when i did in fact contemplate my life without my mother. i was 20-ish. she was diagnosed with breast cancer. back then my eyes swelled and my heart beat fast and there wasn't any relief. until she made it through chemo. and then a year. and then 5 years. and i remember figuring out [also in the middle of the night] that when you think you are going to loose or as you frantically look for something you have lost, you hold your breath. holding your breath helps you fight back those tears. holding your breath is a silent and strange prayer to whatever it is you think might be able to solve your problem. you hold your breath while your brain rapidly fires - look over there, where did you last see it, maybe if you make a bargain, maybe you deserve to loose this, maybe there's something you can do, maybe not. and if you are able, lucky enough, persistent enough, tough and durable enough, vulnerable and accepting enough, you can release that breath and inhale deeply.