Inventing Cereal Day

Look, it’s getting silly. It is. It’s too much. There’s now a “National _______ Day” every damn day. And I swear there’s several days dedicated to both donuts and biking to work. (Come to think of it, those two should come in equal proportions.) March 7^th is National Cereal Day. It’s one of the few National Days our family observes. The thing is, we've been doing it since the mid-1950s. According to NationalDayCalendar.com no one can “identify the creator of National Cereal Day.”  Well, I would like to remedy that.

This is what love looks like

When I was a kid my mother told me about a glorious day. It was a day to be anticipated and revered in the same light as Christmas or Easter. This was Cereal Day. It was 1982 and I was going to be introduced to a family tradition. You see, my grandmother wasn’t interested in feeding her family the sugary cereals that were coming to prominence during the Mad Men era. My mom and her siblings grew up on Cream of Wheat and Corn Flakes. But grandma wasn’t made of stone. She designated one day each year, March 5^th*, as Cereal Day; a day when each member of the family could choose any cereal they wanted. 

My mom was tie-dyed in the wool socks hippie. I was raised in true Berkeley fashion on a diet of sprouts and whole grains. I choked down Mueslix with goat’s milk or granola and soymilk. But my mom was a fool for tradition, so once each year on March 5^th, I was allowed to choose any cereal I wanted. I went through phases. I drifted from Cocoa Krispies to Cap’n Crunch with brief forays into Lucky Charms and Froot Loops. As a young adult I continued to celebrate Cereal Day. Even though I was living on my own and could have had any cereal at any time, there was something special about maintaining the discipline and singular joy of waiting for that one time each year.

You need to get the one with the most sugar

As a dad it was a no-brainer that Cereal Day would continue for my kids. Luckily, even though my wife evolved into being an even bigger hippie than my mom, she doesn’t totally hate fun. So Cereal Day lives! My kids look forward to Cereal Day like they look forward to Halloween. They revel in it. They talk about it and plan for it for weeks ahead of time. They have even started their own tradition, mixing all their cereals together into a chocolaty, fruity, marsh mellow morass that makes my teeth hurt as type. None of it would have been possible if not for my grandmother inventing cereal day. Long before the Internet, long before the proliferation of 365-special-interestdays-a-year, a single mother in Berkeley invented a holiday in order to control her children’s diets. I have no idea how the cereal industry got wind of the date, but I can’t entertain it as a coincidence. I'm sure they moved it by two days in order to avoid a controversy, but I'm on to them. My grandmother invented Cereal Day. Your welcome.

We Bereave: Why this Warriors Championship Carries Personal Meaning

The Warriors just won another NBA championship, but you may have already heard about that. If you follow me on social media, you know I'm a big Warriors fan. I'm standing in my kitchen this morning in an old Chris Mullin jersey. I'm a little sleepy, and a little hung over, and very happy.

I recently did a guest spot on a podcast with my brother, "Uncle Nacho." He's launching a new weekly sports podcast called, Nacho Average Sports Podcast. We recorded it in the kitchen of the house we grew up in, a house we now own because our mother passed away ten years ago. During the conversation we talked about this recent run of success by the Dubs, and thought back to the days when they were terrible, and we could actually get tickets.

Back in those days the crowd cheered more for the prospect of a free chalupa than for a chance to win a game. After all, what's one win in a 60 loss season? A chalupa, given away when the Warriors scored 100 points or more, was like money in your pocket. Those were the days when our next door neighbor would offer us his season tickets and we'd have to seriously consider whether it was worth the $20. We went to a few games a year, mostly losses, and just had a good time hanging out with each other. It was usually some combination of me, my brother, my step dad, and my friend Daniel.

Mom got sick ten years ago. Her cancer was already advanced, and progressed quickly. She died on April 7th, 2007. Ten days later the men of the family took in a welcome distraction, going to watch the Warriors take on the Mavericks in the last home game of the season. Dallas had already secured the best record in the league and the number one seed in the playoffs. The Warriors were fighting for a chance at the postseason, where if they made it they'd have to face these same Mavericks. That night was the last home game for noted Warriors albatross Adonal Foyle. Foyle had become a symbol of everything wrong with the Warriors of that era. He had a huge contract coupled with performances that got him glued to the bench. But at this last game, he took a moment to acknowledge the fans and he got a standing ovation. It's one of the great things about Warriors fans, and sports fandom in general. A guy we couldn't wait to see leave town, got a standing ovation.

If you follow sports at all you know that this was the We Believe team. Over the next couple weeks they became the first team in NBA history to go into the playoffs as the number eight seed, and defeat the top seed in a seven game series. It was sublime. It was incredible. It caused the otherwise composed Mavericks star, Dirk Nowitzki to hurl a garbage can at a wall, causing a hole that the Warriors never repaired. Instead, they left it as a tribute to what that team accomplished.

"Dirk Nowitzki created this hole in wall at Oracle Arena by throwing garbage can after playoff upset. pic.twitter.com/7q2Leh4Qbm

— Ben Bolch (@latbbolch) March 8, 2015"

That playoff run, which ended in the second round, did something else for our family, and for me. It helped us cope with losing our mother. It gave us something to do together for a couple hours other than grieve. It gave me an opportunity to pull out of my role as executor, and all the legal maneuvering that entails. I was flying back and forth from D.C. to take care of things and that playoff run helped keep me connected to my home town and community. It was the early, cumbersome, expensive, days of texting. But we fired texts back and forth. Friends called me at 1:00am my time, scream out "WAAAAARRRRIOOOOOORRRSSS!!!!!" and hang up, just to share the moment. That team helped us through that time.

Sports is family.

Look at the Warriors over the last three years. Steph Curry with his daughter on his lap throughout his 2015 championship press conferences. Draymond Green holding his sleeping infant as the confetti fell last night. Kevin Durant dancing with his mom on the floor, and then thanking her at his presser. Shaun Livingston talking about his daughter on the local postgame show. Steph's parents at every game.

I've written about how sports was the one thing I shared with my otherwise absent father. Sports is how I found a common interest with my step dad. Sports was how I found time to hang out with my little brother. Now, ten years after mom died there we were in the kitchen talking about sports, and the Warriors, and the 2007 team. Last night my kids got to stay up later than usual, and see their first championship. Last year I wrote about how watching the Warriors lose last year with my son helped make me a better sport. I've learned so much about sportsmanship just by having to think about how I act in front of my kids. Now I got a chance to think about how to celebrate in front of them. We talked about why KD was hugging his opponents. We talked about how once the game ends, you respect your opponents. We shared a moment of joy, and a chance to learn something about the world.

She drapes herself in Maryland 

Kevin Durant gave a shout out to his home area of Prince George's County, Maryland. It was big moment for my daughter, who spent the first five years of her life in PG, and has a deep and abiding love for Maryland. She's a big KD fan now. She insisted that we send this pic to KD on Twitter.

My mom never met these kids who are living in her house. She isn't here to see another generation sleeping in the room that once was mine, and later my brother's. We're here because she's gone. People sometimes say we're lucky to have inherited a house in Berkeley without really thinking through what that means. But here we are, and I think about her every day. I think about her as I cook in her kitchen and sleep each night in her room. I think of her as I watch Matt Barnes, the prodigal son and only current Warriors player from that 2007 We Believe team, win a championship a decade after the Warriors helped us through the worst month of my life.

I was there

People ask why we watch. People ask what sports fandom is about. How can we care so much about something we're not involved in? It's because fandom isn't about wins and losses. It's not about civic pride, though it can be at times. Fandom is about connection. It's about getting on a crowded train and knowing you're at home with all the other fans. It's about welcoming visiting fans and talking about the game with them, showing them the best of our city. It's about having touchstones that help you mark the occasions in your life, or being able to say, "I was there."

It's 2017, Chris Mullin wore #17, that '07 game against Dallas was on the 17th. Smirk if you will, but that means something to me.

Sports is family.



UPDATE: I met Matt Barnes, and he signed my We Believe t-shirt. It was a cool moment.

Check out Uncle Nacho's podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/uncle-nacho/nacho-average-sportscast-ep-1

Guesting on the Uncle Nacho Podcast

Me, Uncle Nacho and Grandma Yo

There are potential big moves going on here at IDL headquarters and I haven't been free to write much here lately. I'll be excited to reveal all that's been happening as it closes in on being released, but for now I'm excited to share my recent appearance on the Uncle Nacho podcast.

Full disclosure, Jiro Ignacio Palmieri aka "Uncle Nacho" is my younger brother. He's been involved audio, media, and radio for a few years now. He had a radio show in the San Francisco bay area on KPOO radio. Now he hosts the Uncle Nacho podcast, which "examines the intersections between sports, politics, art, and culture." The interview is a great overview of how I came to lead An Interdisciplinary Life and what that's meant for me. It's sort of this whole site here compressed into an hour of story telling. So if you've enjoyed reading IDL think of this as IDL on the go, a chance to get your Berto time and also do dishes.

This is part one of our interview. In this episode I talk about going to elementary school as a vagabond in Europe for a year and comparing it to American public schools. We discuss racial identity, how flipping over a white water raft full of Deaf kids led me to a career as an interpreter, my dad teaching me how to make a zip gun, and the creation of "Your Mom is So Berkeley." We also touch on alternative educational paths, growing up with a single mother, and a Berkeley High School legacy I had totally forgotten about. Within all of that we do indeed intertwine sports, arts, and culture.

If you scroll down past the embedded podcast there's some expanded info on things we didn't have answers to during the podcast.
 

There was a question that came up about how my family ended up in Chicago. I asked the branch of the family that stayed in Chicago and got a great response relating to Japanese American history. From my cousins Midori, Vince, and Rea who are all amazing artists and writers. The block below is edited together from their responses to my question.

Because jobs and housing weren't available to Japanese Americans post WWII on the west coast a Japanese community developed in Chicago around that time probably to support each other. Vince and his wife were in Hattiesburg Mississippi and they heard there was more work in Chicago for JAs (editor’s note: Vince is my grandma Yoshiko’s brother). Also, the American government had already taken our family’s home and real estate. They came up and settled in Hyde Park/South Side along with many other friends from camp and Hattiesburg. Hattiesburg was the home of the 442^nd all Japanese Battalion. I'm not sure what Vince's first job was in Chicago before he became photo editor at Playboy. He only moved back to California once his job made that available to him. Yoshiko must have joined them at some point.

The folks who ran the camps were mostly liberal, though their good intentions generally did as much harm as good. They had an idea that you could solve racism by sending JAs out of camps into areas away from the West Coast, a few at a time and that they'd be accepted and assimilated if they kept apart from other JAs. This was obviously a terrible idea because (1) segregation wasn't a choice and (2) you try living among people who hate you without allies. So, there were serious programs to resettle folks out of camp, but the ones who left had to create new communities. The largest migration was to Chicago, which was possibly the most important JA city for a couple of years after the war, before everyone who hadn't made a stake there pretty much decided to go back to the West Coast. I think Larry's (another of Yoshiko’s brothers) JACL ties also meant a lot--there were some serious divisions among JAs about how to respond to incarceration and I suspect going to Chicago probably said something about you/your family.

Thanks for reading and listening. If you have any other unresolved questions from the interview let me know in the comments. I'll post the second part of the interview when it becomes available.

Suicide and Survivor's Guilt

One of the few times we were all together after my first birthday.

There are aspects of life that highlight the contrast between the things you know and the things you feel. There are trivial ones, like sports fan superstitions, and then there's things like coping with suicide. It's common for the people left behind to carry guilt. We feel like we should have been able to do something. If only we'd seen it coming, if we'd called, said something, answered the phone, whatever it is we feel we should have been able to do to prevent it. We feel this way even though it's probably not true. It's not our fault. It's the difference between what we know and what we feel.

My uncle committed suicide shortly before I was born. As long as I've been a conscious person I've been aware that people sometimes kill themselves. It became part of the backdrop of my life, something that was always a possibility. When I was twenty a friend hung himself in the stairwell of my house. We always believed that the 15 bedroom house was so big, and busy at all hours, that he expected to stopped. Or he was making a statement. Either way, I didn't feel guilty, or angry. It was just something that happened. We all knew that the way we lived as adolescents, some of us weren't going to make it to adulthood. I didn't blame my friend, I knew there was something wrong inside him that he couldn't control.

My dad was different. I had been married a few months when I came home and found a police officer's business card stuck in my screen door. It was the coroner's office. They wanted me to come identify the body. I was a thirty-year-old orphan. It wasn't fair. Not just that he'd died, but that he'd lived as long as he had, while my mom died of cancer at 54. My mother did everything "right." She was vegetarian, a swimmer, she drank her one glass of wine. She raised me. 

My dad was the opposite. He wasn't around when I was a kid. At one point I hadn't heard from him in so long that I started telling people he had died. Growing up in the South Bronx projects, he was at times a gang member, a heroine addict and an alcoholic. He claimed he'd been shot once. He didn't eat well or exercise. But he was indestructible. I was six-years-old when he first beat cancer. He lost a lung that time. At twelve I came home one night and found him comatose from vodka and pills. My senior year of college he did it again, they told me he wouldn't live through the weekend. I was told that four weeks in a row before I stopped driving the 400 miles home on Fridays. They later found him wandering the ICU looking for cigarettes. He'd woken up from an induced coma, pulled out all the tubes, and set about finding some smokes. That's also when he beat cancer the second time. They'd found he had prostate cancer but didn't treat it until they knew he'd recover from the pneumonia.

In later years he survived diabetes and a car accident that destroyed his car and lost him his license. By 2008 he was losing his sight and a foot. We had been in touch sporadically over the years, trying to repair a broken past. I wasn't as attentive as I could have been in the year after my mother passed. I was also newly married and we were waiting out the three months before telling people we were expecting a baby. We were three days from the big announcement when I found the card in my door.

I could have called him earlier and told him he was going to be a grandfather. I still can't shake the feeling that I might have been able to give him something to live for. After every incident my dad would say, "Nothing can kill me. I'm from the Bronx." He was right. The only thing that could end his life was his own desire to die. I don't know if he was depressed about our fractured relationship, or if he was weary of his rapidly deteriorating body. Maybe it was a quality of life issue. Maybe staying alive for his grandson would have been a burden rather than a relief. The problem with suicide is you rarely get answers. None of the four suicides that have touched my life have involved a note. Without one no matter how much I know I couldn't have changed it, I feel like I might have.

I didn't know my dad well at the end of his life. I did love him. I do miss him. I miss having that link to my childhood. I miss being able to compare my son to myself at the same age. I have no one now who can tell me if he's just like me. To this day, no matter how much I read to the contrary, I carry the guilt of not having done enough to save him.

It's not my fault. It's not yours either.

#TBT: My Mom on Twitter

So right, my mom was never on Twitter. If Twitter had been a thing when I was kid I'm sure she would have been posting these quotes from her four-year-old son just like I do with my kids. Instead she had the first two pages of this journal where she put down some of her favorite quotes.

I think this first one was influenced by my love of West Side Story

I've written about my mother's journals before, and I've posted a passage from the diary I kept when I was nine-years-old. I'm still packing up for our move and I'm still looking through everything as I go.

So happy Throwback Thursday, here's the wit and witticisms of preschool Berto.

 

Sorry kids, I've been making these terrible jokes since I was your age

These Kids Aren't the Kids I Expected

My mother's grandparents (top) and parents (bottom)

I had it all wrong. Well, I guess we had it all wrong, but that includes me.

When my wife and I got engaged we knew right away that we wanted to start having kids as soon as we were married. We spent our year-long engagement talking about our future family. Some of this discussion involved preparing T for being the white mother of tan babies. T is mostly of Irish descent, I am mixed with Puerto Rican (which is really a mix already), Japanese, and what my mother called "Euro Potpourri." We figured that the various darker sides my heritage would dominate our children's gene expression. We were wrong.

My father's parents

My son was born at 9 pounds and with blonde hair and blue eyes. All of a sudden I was the one who had to adjust to looking different than my son. I prepared my "I'm not the nanny" speech, with different versions of different lengths. It was an adjustment. It wasn't terrible, but it was an adjustment. My daughters have darker hair and look more Asian than my son, though the baby's eyes are still undeclared.

There have been a few mix ups over the years, though fewer than I expected. My wife tells me that other parents and people at day care have assumed that my kids have different fathers. There was the time at the ER when the doctor refused to start talking until he could determine why I was standing so close by. That was a weird one. He called out our name, T approached with Buddy in her arms, and I approached behind them with Lou in tow. The doctor kept looking away, then looking at me, then looking away again, but not saying anything. He finally made gesture to T that said, "what is going on? Who is that guy? Should I say something?" T told him who I was and you could see his shoulders relax and the red start to drain from his face.

Another time my wife went to fill a prescription for my son and had the Asian American pharmacist tell her, "You know that's a Japanese name right?" "Yes," T answered, "he's named after his father who is Japanese." I have always wished she'd have added, "You know Annabelle is a European name?"

For the most part it's been easy, but there are still things that catch me off guard. For example, St. Patrick's Day was never a big deal at my house. Sure, there were many years when my mom would make corned beef and cabbage, but at some point we found out my grandfather was part Scottish and only drank like he was Irish. I wore green to school, but that was mostly to avoid being pinched.

It's different now. Thanks to my wife St. Patrick's Day is now kind of a thing for us. This includes making special Irish themed shirts for the kids. I am all for cultural pride, but I'll admit that sending Buddy to school in that shirt made me uneasy. He goes to a predominantly African American school, like I did for many years. Even though I don't identify as white I was considered white by my classmates and I quickly learned to not do anything that highlighted my whiteness. I joked to my brother that I had sent Buddy to school in a "white power" t-shirt, and I worried a little about what he'd face. Nothing happened, which is what I should have expected.

But it's kindergarten and kids are more oblivious to some of this stuff when they're young. What happens as he gets older and everyone becomes more jaded? White people celebrating their culture doesn't bother me. But when it's my own kids I start to have worries that I didn't expect to have. Having the worries makes me uneasy because I feel like I shouldn't worry. I have no idea what I really think about this yet.

Over the years I've tried to keep the kids aware of their Japanese and Puerto Rican heritage because that's what I know, and because it's the side that I think they can most easily lose. I feel that if they just pass for white they'll be treated as white and they'll lose touch with the other components of our cultures.

I've also noticed that I've held on to some anachronistic parenting approaches that don't apply to my kids the way they did to my brother and I. For example, my mom bought my brother a light brown skinned baby doll so that he could have a doll that looked like him. I was thrilled when my cousin gave my daughter a similar doll. I have also felt compelled to color my princesses brown when we color together. I want my kids to see these representations even though the kids are much lighter than my brother or I.

Diversity is good for any kid, I know that my motivations come from wanting to make sure they feel they are represented in their own play. I do this even though the things I'm exposing them to don't really look like them as much as they look like my brother or our cousins. So really it's that I want them to see me in their play. I'm not sure how I feel about this. I think it also goes back to me wanting to make sure they remember the parts of their heritage that I think they are most likely to lose if left to be what the world tells them.

The world is becoming friendlier to mixed people. I think there's less pressure to identify as one thing. And as much as I want them to identify like I identify, I know I need to embrace my kids' Irish side. (Even so, those shirts kind of freak me out.)

Excerpt 1983

“I hate you! I hate you!” I screamed at him small and red faced, smudged and salt streaked with tears. “You stupid little bastard. Sometimes I wish I could just give you away.” He wailed and crumbled in the back seat in the car and my anger, fed by pleasure blazed in viciousness.

The perfect excuse for anger, for letting loose of control.

My feelings have been so bad lately, so frustrated, lashing out. Crippled by depression – the job, feeling hurt, hopeless, confused, who, what, why. Feeling hateful, it’s draining. Pencils in my back. I can’t concentrate on work and I make lists that irritate me. I don’t want to exercise. Ugly times and fights at work. Don’t want to be there.

I fly off the handle when I find my son has lost his second set of $55 dental equipment. “I want to die!” he cries. Superstitious thoughts spring into my mind. What if, because I’m cruel, it happened?

Where’s Martin when I need him? The bell rings and rings, he’s not home. Is he alright? (How will I be punished? My worst most frightening fantasies coming true?)

My child is not happy either. He imitates me in temperament and action. “I can’t do anything. I’m useless.” he sobs. I’m mad at myself because I’m so absent minded.

But in some way maybe this is a growing point for us. Tito is less of a child because he is starting to split from me. I have to treat him like a big boy, to share my feelings. Maybe it’s wrong to tell your children your problems but I can’t handle them alone.

Maybe I’m poisoning him. I’m showing him an immature way to react to problems. I was treated that way, it’s what I know and I pass this horror to my son.

I love him, I just don’t know how to.

Cheated

Recently, during the end of a family evening, I felt the loss of my mother more acutely than I have in a while. It was during a conversation about my in laws. My wife and I have been on the outs with them for about six months and when we were discussing it this time she hit on an important issue. One of the big issues is that they don’t seem to put any value or priority in getting to know their grandson. And the thing is that whatever they’re mad at us about has become so important to them that they’d rather avoid us than see him. All this continues despite my wife’s attempts to put aside her own discomfort with them to get the family together. While discussing this I felt void left by my mother’s death as if it had just happened. Our lives would be so different if she were still here.

My mother would have wanted to see Ryu as much as possible. In my day dreams, where my mother is alive and well and living just a mile and a half away, we see her three or four times a week. We’re there for dinner because we were passing by and we stopped in and then we all got hungry. She’s over at our place reading to him while sitting on a big pillow on the living room floor. She’d convince us to let her come over to baby sit on Wednesdays so we could get out for a couple hours. In all the dreams of him growing up she’s there rooting him on, smiling that satisfied smile knowing that she’ll do even better with him than she did with us because she won’t have to worry as much. She would have brought all the joy and passion to being a grandmother that she brought to her work and her friendships. She’d be perfect.

Of course this is all fantasy. No one’s perfect. Beyond that if my mother had never gotten sick there’s a good chance we wouldn’t be back in California. If she hadn’t died we may not have felt the same urgency to come back here. We might still be in DC wondering what we were going to do about childcare and desperate to meet other parents. We certainly wouldn’t be in our current home since my mother’s life insurance became the down payment. Instead we’d likely be upside down on some condo in Silver Spring. Still, I think we would have come back by now. I can’t see anything in the last few years that would have convinced me to raise my kids in DC. If there was a positive in my mother’s passing it was that it got us back to our community. Back to our friends who are already experienced parents. Back to the people who can give us advice, and support, and hand me downs. Her passing brought us home.

The next day I heard this story on This American Life. It’s about a woman who’s mother had cancer and knew she was going to die. So the mother wrote a series of letters for her daughter to open each year on the daughter’s birthday beginning at age 18. In the end the daughter and her father come to see the letters as a kind of curse. For them the problem is that while they continued to grow and change the voice of the letters did not. They felt stuck trying to adhere to the wishes of someone, long since gone, who every year would try to exert some influence on their lives. Again I felt my mother’s absence like a swirling vortex in my soul.

My mother and I got to say goodbye, but that was all we got. I know I might sound selfish because many people don’t even get that but I still feel cheated. We could have had so much more except no one would acknowledge that my mother was dying. When she was diagnosed she already had stage four renal cell carcinoma; a kind of cancer that doesn’t respond to traditional cancer therapies like chemo. After the first few months I knew she was going to die. But because she couldn’t admit it, or she was trying to be brave for my brother, or she really thought she’d pull through we never talked about the possibility.

Because no one would talk about mom dying we never got to have the conversations I longed for. I wanted to get closure on all the things that had haunted us for so long. I wanted to tell her that she had been a good mother and that I forgave her for all the negative things that had passed between us. I wanted to get her advice on marriage and child rearing. Mostly I just wanted us to be able to spend her last months really loving each other without reservation. Instead I felt pressured to keep up with the manic positivism of the rest of my family. After all “everything” was “going to be OK.” We’d have plenty of time to hash out the past.

Surprisingly, when my mother died it was sudden and unexpected. She had gone in for some tests and was supposed to go home but she ended up staying. She never did go home. I had spoken to her on Thursday afternoon. This was a day after she was supposed to have gone home. “They’re just going to keep me over one more night for observation. I’ll call you tomorrow. I love you.” Those were the last words my mother ever spoke to me. Not bad as last words go. The next time I saw her she had a tube down her throat and couldn’t talk. That was Friday night. I was living in Washington DC and I’d had kind of a bad feeling all morning when I got a call at my office. The doctor on the phone said that if I was going to see my mother again it had better be today. Two hours later I was on a plane to California.

When I got to the hospital and spoke to the doctors it was clear that my mother wasn’t going to recover. Her organs, at least the ones that filter toxins weren’t working at all and her blood wasn’t clotting. They had kept her alive by inducing a coma and pumping a constant stream of blood in and out of her body. The thing that happens with this is that over time the brain is slowly starved of oxygen. They could have kept her like that for a while, but she’d be a vegetable. The most humane option was to turn everything off and let her go. The one solace was that they offered to wake her up and let her say goodbye.

As the oldest and only adult child the decision making role had fallen to me. When my mom came to and started to reconnect with the world around us she recognized me and took my hand. “Hi mom.” was all I could muster. I think she could see it in my eyes. She knew why I had come. With the breathing tube adhered to her face she mouthed as best she could, “It’s OK. It’s OK. I’m ready.” I explained to her what was going on. She nodded in comprehension and agreement. In her eyes I could see she was trying to comfort me. We were able to call a small group of her close friends in to say goodbye. Mom had faded a little bit by then having turned up her pain meds with the little button next to her bed. I introduced them as one at a time they each got a few minutes to say goodbye. I knew my mom was lucid when I mispronounced someone’s name and she shook her head vigorously. “Mom, Judy’s here. Would you like to talk to Judy?” This was followed by a very strong “negative” “I’m Julie honey.” “Sorry. Mom Julie’s here.” Affirmative. She knew what was happening.

After friends and family had had their opportunity for closure I was able to have one last moment. Around her tube she mouthed, “It’s OK. You can let me go. I’m ready.”

And that was it.

And it should be enough, but it’s not.

I feel cheated.

Not just because my mother died. Not just because my son will never know this wonderful woman. Not just because she missed out on a really fun joyful part of her life that she had been looking forward to for years. I feel cheated because of this bullshit sense that we all have be endlessly optimistic. I feel cheated because I didn’t get to have those final conversations with her that I needed. Maybe it sounds selfish. Maybe it is selfish. After all dying is a very personal process. But goddamnit she’s dead and I’m still here. I’m the one who has to keep living with this pit in my heart every day. I’m the one who has to look at my son and know that there are no answers to my questions.

Which brings me back to the This American Life story. I would give almost anything to have one last token of my mother’s love. One last message, something I could hold on to, something tangible that shows she was thinking about how I could cope with the future without her. I wish she had written something to Ryu, to me, to the family, something that we could go back to and say, “See, this is what grandma thought. This is what she had to say before she left.” The problem for the people in the story isn’t that they were growing and changing it’s that they felt the need to argue with ghost instead of just appreciating that in her final days that mother wanted to remain as a presence for her family. They couldn’t find a way to laugh off or otherwise set aside the parts of the mother’s message that no longer fit their worldview.

I wish my mother still had some presence, any kind of presence, in my life. I don’t really feel one. I don’t’ feel like she’s watching me from heaven. I don’t’ feel like her spirit lives on in the artifacts of hers that I have around my home. I just feel like she’s gone. She’s gone and I’ll always have this hollow spot in my heart. That’s why my in-law’s behavior is so infuriating. They seem like they take it all for granted. They do this despite the fact that my father-in-law may be dying of cancer himself. They have a chance to know Ryu that my mother never had and they don’t care. They’re willing to sacrifice that relationship with him because of some perceived problem with us. I really hope they change their minds before it’s too late. He’s at an age now where he can start to remember people. If you don’t know what you have until it’s gone what happens when you’re the one that’s leaving? What will you leave behind? What will you say before you go? I wish I could have one more message.

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Update: In the years since this was written my wife's parents have been much more present in our lives. I don't remember how it happened, but somehow we were all able to set aside our disagreements and hurt feelings and move on. They have been wonderful supporters of us and our now three children for several years now. My father-in-law is in remission and is now able to travel and visit us. It's wonderful what you can accomplish when you have time on your side.