Chapter 2: Grandpa

The year is 1989. My grandfather, Reverend Shawshew Sakow, is dying. He's been dying for some time now; that is to say, he's been dying slowly and quietly and has been mostly ignored. I hear of his life status every once in a while around the holidays and at those infrequent times my parents are inclined to call long distance to say hello to their kin. Words spoken to me about him are staccato and declarative, "He isn't well."

"He doesn't have long."

"Any day now."

They've been delivered to me in short bursts for over a year and a half now, building in me enough curiosity that I have begun to wonder.

My grandparents live in a modest trailer-home in a trailer park on the outskirts of Fresno, a desert city in the fecund San Joacquin Valley of California that lies between San Francisco and Yosemite National Park. Their daughter, my aunt Rumiko and her in-laws, the Arakawa's, live close by, close enough so that the exact time, place and circumstance of his demise will be recorded with some degree of accuracy.

His passing will cause a small ripple through the hundreds of congregation members who worshipped at one of the many Buddhist temples where my grandfather spent time as their minister, one as far away as San Paolo, Brazil where he was a Bishop for a brief time during his retirement. No doubt, there will be tears and prayers and kind words which mask the indifference most will feel, including his own children's. But I will remember. I will cry inside and feel a loss and emptiness that will probably never leave me. I will force myself to remember.

In the past years my grandfather has become a burden to his wife, Masako, and his family, but mostly to his wife. As he passed into his 80s his body shriveled to a bag of bones and now he weighs about 85 pounds at 5' 5". He's shrunk physically, and rarely has the strength to stand or walk. He gave up his life long obsession with golf (he played 18 holes nearly every day) because he could no longer meet its phsyical demands. His car was taken away because he could not be counted on to return; perhaps he forgot that he had to go home. After a bout with TB, grandma relentlessly hid his cigarettes until he gave up trying to find them.

He's had mysterious spots on his lungs that have been diagnosed as TB, cancer, and water, but which remain a mystery. He has little control of his bowels or bladder and his wife must cleanse him daily. He hardly eats a mouthful each day.

If ever there were a case of someone who had ostensibly given up living, I imagine my grandfather would be a prime candidate. But I'm not so sure. I think he has slipped into a dream.

My grandfather has always been an extremely quiet, thoughtful man. An intellectual widely read with a voracious appetite for books and an ascetic, his meditative nature led him to silent prayer each day. Some would say that he was this way because he was a priest, and I would not argue. As a product of 27 generations of Buddhist priests, he had no other choice in life than to carry on the family tradition of priesthood, the karma of generations whose ties bound him to family, obligation, and destiny. He dutifully fulfilled his destiny and became a Buddhist missionary sent to America in 1936 only to suffer the indignations of racism and militarism in a desert relocation internment camp in Arizona during the Second World War.

I remember once as a child I caught him sitting in his bedroom (my grandparents have separate bedrooms) reading a Japanese-language paperback from his library of multicolored paperbacks. I was in awe of this little library so neatly arranged shelf after and upon shelf within arm's length of his bed and chair. I spied him in a shaft of light smiling and chuckling to himself as he read right to left and up and down the rows of box-like insect scratchings on each page. A cigarette burned in one hand that he would every so often draw to his lips to inhale a small puff from.

I stepped up to him, "What are you reading, grandpa?" I asked sheepishly.

Many times I had scoured his Japanese books and magazines looking for the soft-core sexual cartoons that pervade Japanese popular culture; women with flat cherry-tipped bosoms and hilarious looking couples engaged in various poses of sexual congress.

He smiled and put his book down and drew once again on his cigarette, "A friend of mine wrote this book." He said with a heavy Issei (first generation Japanese-American) accent.

I looked at him with wide eyes, "A friend?" No one I'd ever known had written something that was published and in so tangible a form.

He nodded, "Yes. He and I were monks at the Hongwanji together in Kyoto. Now he's a famous novelist in Japan." Grandfather said this with the slightest tinge of regret as he wiped his glasses clean with a lint cloth.

Suddenly he declared, "Someday I want to write a book."

"You should, grandpa!" I declared excitedly. It seemed like a natural to me. Grandfather had so much to write about, so many experiences as a priest, and his statement had the air of something he'd been pondering for quite a while, as though he meant it.

"Yes," he put his glasses back on and stared into the blinding shaft of light emanating from the window, "I should..."

The way he said this had a melancholy reverberation, and right then and there I knew this was something he'd never get around to doing and I felt crushed and crestfallen. All those experiences, I thought to myself, those insights and recollections, emotions and truths lost the moment my grandfather passes. And now that his time is drawing to a close ever so slowly and quietly, I cannot help but sit down and fill these pages with some memories that would reveal why his life is full of meaning and purpose. And how his lost dreams are my growing obsessions.