7th Sept, 2009
"Clear As Mud" ｗ(-_-;)ｗ
Episode 1: Fearful September
It was 7th of September, Showa 63 (1988), on this day twenty-one years ago, my father died.
On that day, I got a phone call, around two o’clock in the afternoon, that my father was loaded onto an ambulance in critical condition. I am a person who usually move into action immediately but that time, my mind became blank with no idea to do anything until I got another call several minutes later to inform me he had died.
I made a hasty arrangement of flight to come back to my parents’ home and left home with my daughter, my son and my “haunt,” who is supposed to be my husband. I’d like to explain why I have come to call him a haunt, perhaps another time. We managed to catch the train to take us to the airport narrowly in time for the last flight of the day. However, when the haunt saw Zushi on the destination board at Chiba station and shouted at us “This surely wouldn’t go to Tokyo, absolutely wrong!”, we got panicked and off the train, which was soon found to be the right one. We had to change the transportation to night train.
Last Conversation
In the following morning, as I found myself arrived in my parents’ house, I felt weak and fainted a little to try to lean toward my sister who had just come out of the house. She welcomed me back with ducking and weaving my body and rushed to go back to her own house on the same premise. How nice she was. I met my father whose face was peaceful and suggested me that he might not have had much agony at the point of death.
The last talk I had with him was the call from him on 1st of September. I used to hung up and call him back from my side because my parents were in financially hard condition but he insisted leaving the call as it went then. I don’t remember the whole conversation precisely except that he began with “I am deadly hungry…” I offered to ask some lunch box deliveries for him but he declined. Maybe he paid consideration to my sister’s being there. When we ended the phone he said to me “Good bye” which he never said before and this became the last word I heard from his mouth. It is clearly remaining in my ears even now. Long distance phone charge was still expensive in those days. It was very curious that the telephone bill for this conversation arrived when I was at my parents’ home for his forty-ninth-day-after-death ceremony and it was eventually me who were to pay for it. The last letter he wrote was for my daughter though she dares not to speak about what was written there.
Green spot
His cause of death was “incompetence” simply enough. I noticed a trace of green round spew of about four inches in diameter on his bed. It was also strange that my near blind brother-in-law said “There was green stain on his nail. A nurse was trying to wipe it off.”
On 9th, after cremation, we were going to hold his seventh-day-after-death ceremony. (for practical reason, we usually don’t do this on the actual seventh day though it is called so.) When we were expecting a lot of guests, I saw rice in a bowl offered for my father was covered with black cockroaches. It looked too bad and I threw it away. One of my relatives saw it and told me it should be kept till the day of placing ashes in a tomb to be brought there. Then I decided to cook new rice.
However hard I tried, the rice would not get completely cooked, kept on staying halfway gruel-like condition. I felt odd. When I was wondering what to do, I heard a sound of car leaving and I thought my sister and her husband went out for temple to bring an offering. It was then I heard my father calling me by my name. I turned off gas range and followed his voice. There were two bottles of paraquat herbicide, with one new bottle being untouched and the other being somewhat used covered with a bucket. The color of liquid was green. Combining this and the green stain my brother-in-law mentioned made me convinced that my father had killed himself with this. The doctor kindly disguised as “incompetence” not to disturb my children’s future.
When I got back to kitchen, it was odd again that the rice had been cooked well. The path to send through his coffin had been neatly weeded. A woman in the neighborhood told me that when she spoke to my father weeding the approach path a few days prior to his death, he shed a tear for unknown reason. He must have been preparing for his own funeral.
During the ceremony, my mother, who had become semi-demented, said in front of everyone attended, “He swallowed poison to kill himself. He asked me a cup of hot tea then I let him take in.” I tried to stop her but to my surprise, my brother-in-law, who had been usually a sensible person, started digging the details by further questioning in the face of the guests.
Mud Clear As They Always Be
The haunt, being totally independent from my grief, was running on his solo feast beside my father’s urn. He is as clear as mud. Since all guests and relatives had withdrawn to my sister’s house, he was really alone there and seemed to get bored to come to me at my sister’s house and beckoned me with a hand gesture. “Come on, come on, just for a second.” I didn’t know what was the matter. My sister furrowed her brow and urged me to go with him.
I reluctantly followed her direction and went to my parents’ house with him. He demanded my body on the very bed on which my father’s stain was still fresh. He was absolutely as clear as mud. It was so painful that I could do nothing but shed tears. I thought this was the beast under the guise of a man.
When I came back to my sister’s house with red eyes, she gave me a nasty smile. She later said to me “A man has a habit to get aroused in those kind of situation” which I could hardly understand. My life has been encompassed with those incomprehensive people indeed. However, now I can enjoy laughing at those people and experiences.
I knew my mother and my sister had driven my father in suicide. On his last call he complained of being hungry though my sister said she always fed him steaks as big as sandals. She is a master of liar.
And my mother followed in 135 days
In the early morning of January 20th 1989, just after the era changed to Heisei from Showa, I met my father and my mother together in a dream and woke up. I interpreted that he was trying to ask me to look after my semi-demented mother and looked at their picture. A little past six, I got a call from my brother and he said “This time it is mother, who is dead in front of bathroom.” According to my sister, who is not so credible, estimated time of death was between 10PM of 19th and 6AM of 20th. I was counting days everyday from my father’s death and I remember it was 135th day. The portrait used for my mother’s funeral was the photo taken at my father’s 49th day ceremony.
Mysterious events began
Various mysterious events started to happen around me after my father’s death. The first one happened in the taxi back from funeral hall. The haunt was holding the bag of my father’s urn and he suddenly said the fringe of the bag had been lost. Even if it was true, he was never a man who would notice that sort of things. We searched hard inside the taxi but we could not find it. It was after we came back to Chiba that a laundry told me the fringe was in my husband’s jacket pocket. It is least possible that he intentionally put it there, nor it automatically got into there. I felt strange and was introduced an ekisha (an Yi-ching practitioner) by some person to consult. The ekisha told me that it was the message from my father to tell his appreciation toward me who came back fifteen times to see him in critical condition and I should bring the fringe to place it in the tomb on the 49th day ceremony.
My daughter’s fever and my father’s agony
One year, in September, my daughter was suffering a high fever and told me she had a dream of a pond of muddy water. I again went to consult ekisha. He speculated and asked me if there had been someone in my family who committed suicide with toxic agent. He is good at identifying something on dead people even though he is not always correct. I asked the temple to which my parents belonged to give a recital of sutra and then the fever of my daughter went down. I was not sure if it was an effect of sutra or it was just a coincidence. No evidence could prove it anyway.
However, the next year, again in September, my daughter got a high fever and had a dream in which she heard my father wanted us to remove something like clay wall. I had no clue to interpret the dream. When I went to his grave later, I found my sister had been dispersing granular paraquat with beige color for weeding. I had assumed paraquat was green and could not connect it with clay wall but now I understood. I talked with a monk at the temple about it. He told that he tried not to direct too many things to the people but to use paraquat at graves was one of the few things he would say we should not to do.
My daughter continued to get a fever every year. I asked the temple to give a sutra then the fever went down. It was a repetition of this. Initially I had thought her chronic disease causing this, but it happened always in September. Gradually I came to believe in certainty that it was linked to my father. The temple monk said my father’s spirit was wondering around my parents’ house. It had been already destroyed by fire accident which left the land only. The monk said I could purify the land with salt but I couldn’t put myself forward to do that while my sister was living there. Therefore there was no way but to ask the monk to give sutra and took my father back to the temple every year.
Fearful September
My father was born and died in September. Before his death, he was scared with September. He always said “I wish Septembers would pass soon, I feel relieved when Septembers are over and I feel I can live another year.”
For myself, it was a ceaseless continuation of disease after his death. I have been diagnosed as hereditary asthma for two years while there has been no one in my family who had asthma, hyperventilation syndrome which had the opposite symptom of asthma, duodenal ulceration, Meniere's syndrome, and anemia from malnutrition while I was fat with 165 lb. Anemia was caused by bleeding from womb and finally I had total hysterectomy.
In September Heisei 14 (2002), my daughter didn’t get a fever. I said “It seems all right for this year” to her but this time, my son got a fever. He was hospitalized for ureteral stone but the fever was too high to be caused by the operation. Again the recital of sutra at the temple removed his fever.
The next year, Heisei 15 (2003), it was the first September nothing happened since my father died. On 3rd of October, my daughter’s beloved dog died. Later she told me she had seen her grandfather was smiling and holding the dog in a dream. Around that time, the temple monk said “Please feel relieved. Your father has entered the other world in peace.” I interpreted he took there the dog with him. Someone told me that the person killed themselves had to be given sutra by monks one hundred and eight times till they got to the other world. If they are given monthly Buddhist ceremony, it would take nine years. In my father’s case, we didn’t have it monthly and this might be the reason it took about fifteen years till he got into the other world.
After that, I was just taking medicine for ulceration but had no serious disease. Recently my doctor was surprised to tell me I don’t even need the medicines.
For those who thinking about suicide…
I really want to tell everyone what I got from my father’s death and the subsequent experiences after his death.
Hell is not only there but also here. And the both hells are closely interconnected. My father used to say “I will guard you from the other world after I die” when he was alive. Surely he wanted to, but it was not allowed when he actually died. After all, he could not enter the other world without the painful experiences of us who live in this world. This is not a logic or theory but my own feeling based on experience. My son in his childhood once said “Grampa, you need not try to guard us, please calm down” when he watched me suffering from various diseases and others.
It is said that about thirty thousands people kill themselves every year in Japan. For those who thinking about suicide, please know this fact at least. I would consult the temple or ekisha in some cases and I also thought many times that if I believed in some new religions I would get relieved. But I never chose it because it meant to depend on some other person. It was also meaningful to send donation and others to the temple but ultimately it was nothing but our own physical pain which accepted, digested and processed my father’s pain and saved him. I accepted even domestic violence by the haunt as part of this.
Those who committing suicide think in ways such as; it would be at least better than now in this world; I can die for my family (to leave life insurance money etc.); everything will disappear when one dies. But the reality is never like this. The very person who kills oneself should suffer a lot after death of course but at the same time, the same amount of suffering would assault the left family members as a hell in this world, and what’s more, the degree of pain would be fiercer in the order of how much the one loves before death. In my father’s case, I got the most and then my daughter, and my son.
However, having understood it to that extent, I myself made up my mind to kill myself two years ago. I didn’t do it just because the building I entered had windows that were fixed as not to be opened. After I gave up everything and sorted out the unprocessed bequest of my parents to donate all of my portion to the temple, with the milestone of age sixty, I came to be able to see what had not been seen before. This might be a gift from my father to me who had undertaken the sufferings in this world on behalf of him.
My father, who could not enter the other world for more than fifteen years after his death, is now certainly guarding me from there as he promised.
(The End of Episode 1)