Taro

            A few colorful balloons floated solemnly in the lobby of the Berkshire nursing home. There was a small party in progress, more depressing than uplifting, and a few elderly residents and their young relatives were gathered playing simple, menial games. As my brother and I passed through, a kind-looking nurse approached us.

            “You can have some, if you want,” she said jovially, gesturing toward a table of food. On it lay aluminum trays full of sad, decrepit hamburgers.

            “No thanks,” my brother told her. We continued through.

The elevator doors opened to our grandfather’s floor. In front of us, there was a small waiting area with a few chairs, some long-outdated magazines and a copy of the Bible. We navigated the hallways of uniform doors, keeping a watchful eye out for the correct room number. Upon arrival, I saw that our grandfather’s room was ugly, impersonal and sterile. He had just moved in; there were no pictures on the walls or dresser, no fond memories of times past. I knew that, nursing care or not, my grandfather would rather be home.

He greeted us with his strong, gruff voice. We entered and shook his swollen hand. His declining health was evident in his frail, unfamiliar appearance. His mind, however, was as sharp as ever – he was, in essence, the same man as he had been one year, five years, or (I imagine) twenty years before. The same kindness exuded from him, the same fire burned in his gut. The only difference was the weight loss, the bent posture, the hands swollen with fluid from some failing organ or another.

“How’s school going?” he asked.

“Fine,” I replied hesitantly, “the usual.”

I stared at the floor. Seeing him in this state was something I had never gotten used to. It was discomforting to know, or even imagine, that he wasn’t going to live for much longer. Whenever I was with him, that “much longer” always lingered in the back of my mind as some abstract, intangible length of time. It made my stomach turn.

Soon after, my father entered the room. He had something to discuss with my grandfather, something financial, medical or any other number of private affairs. My brother and I were told to wait outside, so we left and sat in the chairs by the elevator. We sat without talking, lost in some reverie or another, avoiding the obvious, uncomfortable point of discussion: our grandfather. At length, after our father had finished, we rode the elevator back down, walked through the lobby, passed the somber party, and drove home.

Early on a Saturday morning, weeks later, I awoke to the sound of my mother talking on the phone in the hallway. Her words were muffled by the closed door, but by her sober, urgent tone, I knew she could only be talking about one thing. I had heard the tone too many times before – it meant that my grandfather was in trouble. Part of me wanted to listen, to know exactly what was happening; the other part was frightened of what I might hear. I lay there in bed, torn between my options, until eventually my mother’s voice faded down the hallway as she left the house.

I looked at the clock. It was early to be up on a weekend, but I had to get up anyways. It was the third Saturday of the month, which meant volunteer work at a local senior center. That day, I remembered, they would be having a celebration for me and my brother in appreciation for our service. Slowly, reluctantly, I rolled out of bed.

The routine was typical. My brother and I set up tables and endured the adoration of the senior citizens. It was early, I was tired, but my sense of duty kept me placing chairs, carrying boxes, and smiling politely at the beaming, elderly faces. There was one deviation from the normal arrangement of furniture: we were to set up a special table of our own, in full view of all other tables, so that we could be the grand spectacles at our celebratory luncheon. Today, we were (as much as I hated the idea) the superstars, and so, in recognition of our dedicated service, the old folks were honoring us with hot dogs.

Just prior to the lunch, with every attendee seated and expectant, the program coordinator presented us to the crowd. We stood, the centers of attention, and waved hesitantly. Hundreds of eyes fell upon us, and I smiled back embarrassedly, trying to look presentable. There were words of appreciation, there were gifts, there was applause, and after an excruciating moment in the spotlight, we were allowed to finally sit and eat.

At some point during the meal, my brother received a phone call. “We have to go,” he said, half through words and half through gesture.

We thanked the coordinator, and were given a final “goodbye” from the feasting crowd. The door closed behind us, and the cold air nipped at our ears and hands as we walked to the car.

I remembered the phone call early in the morning, my mother’s urgent tone, and made the obvious connection. There was now, without a doubt, something wrong, and a cascade of hypotheticals ran through my mind, each of them too fluid, too impossible to grasp. No information had been given over the phone, only an immediate summons to my grandfather’s house. I knew that this lack of news was, in itself, a harbinger of something terrible, and it sat as a lead weight in my mind. We continued, driving without conversation, drawing steadily nearer to the intangible.

Wooden planters flanked the stairs to my grandfather’s front door, full of flowers that seemed always to be caught in a stasis, somewhere between flourishing and wilting. The steps were colored a faded red, the paint chipped off in places. The railing was similar, but painted black, and rough to the touch. My senses heightened, blood rushing through my head, I approached the door. This place, once a comfort, now offered the burden of an unfamiliar, overwhelming dread. An inch of wood now separated us from the inside, the last physical barrier between us and the source of whatever fears we had spun in our minds. As always, the doorbell wasn’t working – it hadn’t worked for as long as I could remember – so one of us knocked.

The door opened to the familiar sight of my grandfather’s living room. The floors and furniture were clean, unblemished; no one had lived in the house for months. Inside, my aunts and my parents were strewn about the room, as they would have been at a holiday gathering, waiting expectantly.

As my brother and I entered, the arms of my mother took us in an embrace. Her voice, breaking, offered words of comfort for unknown ills. Around the room, every face was devoid of cheer, lined with burden of harsh realizations. Confusion gripped me, and the insurmountable weight of possibility charged through my head, drowning out all else. One of my aunts said something nostalgic. The other agreed. I panicked. The intangible became terribly clear, filled the room. My eyes drifted left, from my aunts toward the fireplace.

Oh shit.

On a small, out-of-place table stood a portrait of my grandfather, taken a few months before the downward spiral of his health began. Around it were flowers, candles, a small wooden shrine backed by a print of the Buddha. There was a small bronze cup, full of rice, a customary offering to those in the afterlife.

Oh shit.

At this point, I knew. Nobody had said it outright, but I knew. The intangible was no longer so – it hit me in the back of the head, knocked the wind out of me, left me there, dazed. I sat down, drained, on the couch across from my aunts. Grandpa used to sit here, watch the evening news, wrapped in a blanket. He used to sleep here in the afternoons, snoring loudly. Grandpa is dead.

My aunts punctuated the gloom with words, added to it.

“He looked so peaceful.”

“The doctors said it wasn’t painful.”

“I can’t believe we’re orphans now.”

At length, my father offered a welcome distraction, ordered me to retrieve a bouquet of flowers from the trunk of his car. I left through the same door I entered, walked back down the same steps. It was raining; each drop shocked my skin, acted as a cold reminder of the unforgiving. I was as grateful to get back inside the house, flowers in hand, as I was to have left it.

My father had relocated to the dining room, was navigating my grandfather’s small book of important phone numbers. He was, I learned, calling people, friends and relatives, to tell them the news.

Hi, Mrs. ____? It’s Wes Fukumori. I was calling to let you know, Dad passed away this morning. Those words reverberated through my head, call after call, never losing their impact. His heart gave out. He didn’t feel any pain. I sat, silent, listening, waiting for the list of numbers to reach its end.

Thoughts began to form in my mind, ideas began to pool. I imagined the people on the other side of the phone line, their eyes misty, penetrated by a sense of loss, a pervading sadness. Who were they? How did they know my grandfather? These, I knew, were the people who had known him for his whole life, who had been at his side through hard labor, through the internment camps, through countless struggles out of the range of my imagination. Like me, these people loved him, were struck dumb by his departure.

And then, steadily, the slow, daunting question overtook my mind: How did I know my grandfather? He was, to me, a kind of guardian, a caretaker; he would pick me up from school, would take me back to his house, this house, until my parents would retrieve us when work was over. He always appeared caring, in person and in photographs.

But this, I realized, was a fraction of this man. I lacked completely a historical perspective, a deeper understanding of the things that shaped him. I knew nothing of his dreams, his aspirations, his vision of a perfect world. His past, to me, was a series of disjointed events, lacking a complete sense of significance. He had grown up as a farmer, poor and hard-working. He had been interned by the government, had later served during the Korean War. He had worked for United Airlines, had raised a family, had been a golfer, had given up smoking when my brother was born. My knowledge of him, outside of our own interpersonal relationship, was reduced to bullet points, items on a list. I knew only what I saw of him. I didn’t really know him at all, and now it was too late to ask.

I stared over my shoulder, out the window. It was nighttime, the phone calls had ended. Puddles in the street reflected the orange glow of the streetlamps, their surfaces disturbed by the still-falling rain. Waves of regret crashed upon me, drowned out everything else. Everyone was set to leave; lights in the house had been turned off, the candles at the makeshift altar had burned down or been extinguished.

Cold February air mingled with the warmth of the house as the front door was opened. We left the house one-by-one, minding the slick steps, the ambient noise of raindrops on pavement filling our ears. My father, always the last to leave, switched off the remaining lamp. Behind me, the door closed familiarly, making the sound that it had always made.