Friday Sabbath: The Changeability of Human Life

Everyone has heard a story that describes some life-changing event. Examples of these events range from war to conversations to science class.

Off the top of my head, I once heard from a professor about the day he chose to be a vegetarian. He was in Biology class and the teacher pulled out the frogs for dissection. At this point in our history, the frogs were delivered alive. The teacher showed them how to kill the frog (take it by its legs, swing your arm behind you, then whack its head against a counter) and then how to open it quickly so one could observe the heart still beating before the creature expires. My professor got up, left the room, and took a walk around the school. During that walk, he made the decision to "never eat anything that had a mother or a face."

Most of us have also heard about certain spiritual personalities who have these great awakenings somewhere out in nature. Siddhartha and Thich Naht Hahn are such personalities that discovered their own significant truths while communing with the great outdoors.

Then there are horrific stories... stories that would change both the person who experienced it and those who hear about it. I have had so few actual events that would be worth explaining in terms of how they altered who I am or what I believe. However, I collect stories all the time and, for the first time in a few years, I've read one that will again change me...

I've been doing some research lately on my grandmother's homeland. I have a book comprised of a collection of stories told by Okinawan women from the war era (1940s), the occupation period (1960s-70s), and the contemporary generation. I'm currently reading about my grandmother's space in history during the war. I have heard snippets of her story from my relatives. However. reading a personal account not only forces me to think how little I asked my own grandmother, but the blind eye I turned to the very idea of her story and circumstances because it was just too uncomfortable to imagine.

According to one account, the war was not real to this particular 14 year old until March 23, 1945 when the bombing started. She and her family took very few belongings and ran from the violence. There were eight members in her family; her grandmother, two parents, four siblings, and herself. They would sometimes walk for whole days, never stopping. They ended up hiding in caves with twenty or thirty other people choking on the stench of human excretion (they had to relieve themselves inside the cave because of the bombs). They hid in abandoned houses. They kept moving to avoid the violence though, occasionally, there was no where to run.

They watched their own hearts close up. In one abandoned house, they could hear a baby crying, having figured out that a pregnant woman had given birth alone in one of the rooms in the house. No one moved to help her, and no one heard her make a sound. Eventually, the sounds of the baby silenced. The assumption was that the mother died in childbirth and eventually the baby died as well. The speaker tells the reader that motivations change from humanity to self-preservation...

A bomb went off while they were traveling at one point which caused them to separate. The father, grandmother, and two siblings remained behind (never to see the rest of the family again) while the 14 year old walked on with her mother, sister, and baby brother. They were all malnourished, living off a starch mixture called imokuzu. The mother became so weakened that she was unable to produce milk for the baby she carried, so she fed him the imokuzu as well. They hid in a shed for a few days before another bomb changed the shape of the family.

The mother walked outside one morning and her children heard a bomb fall. Sure that her mother must have been killed, the speaker sat in her place, shocked, thoughts and blood racing. Her mother walked back into the shed and her children were amazed. However, she suffered major injuries, blood poured from everywhere on her body. Her wounds began to rot and become infected (maggots eventually started feeding off the dying flesh while the mother was still alive.

One day, pale and worn down, the mother asked her children to take a nap with her. When the speaker woke, the mother had already turned cold. A man was burying his family somewhere outside the shed. She asked him to bury her mother, too, but he refused. I can't do justice to the feelings that she must have felt, that I feel, as I consider such an emotional catastrophe.

American soldiers eventually came and found the children. They were all separated... including the baby. What really killed me, as if all of this is not enough, were her thoughts on her youngest sibling:

As for my baby brother, my sister told me he'd been placed in a separate room in the orphanage. On her second day there, she went to the room where the babies were kept to check on him, but he was gone. To this day we don't know what happened to him. I wonder sometimes if he's alive or dead. Did someone adopt him? Did he die of malnutrition? I don't know. But I'd like to believe that he lived.
-Junko Isa

Records were not well kept in this part of the world at this time. Okinawa is terribly small, but, apparently, it's big enough to lose people.

I feel as though I know something now from which I can never return to not knowing. I can't brush this under the rug. I can't pretend it isn't happening. I feel as though a whole room inside my heart, soul, mind, or something has been flung open.

My grandmother was lucky enough to have her mother come out alive during this war. My great grandmother made it just past her 90s. Her daughter flew from America back home to celebrate her mother's 88th birthday (a significant age in the Okinawan tradition when a very large, elaborate party is thrown).

However, my grandmother lost a sister. I had heard my family say, since I was relatively young, "Your grandmother's sister died in her arms." That was like telling me how many people died on the Titanic. It didn't feel real. It was such a far away thought that I just could not grasp before now...

...the way I have mourned my grandmother is so selfish. I mourned her out of my deep affection and love for her. I loved this person who made me feel valued, smart, quick, and special. What did she obtain in return... other than making me feel better about myself? I couldn't even take her life, her trials, seriously. It was all a story that I shrugged off... I just couldn't understand. It was too much.

But, now, "that too much" has caught up with me.

I know it's possible to go too deep into this tunnel... to the point where the sunshine will no longer be visible. I'll try not to go there, but I feel so heavy with what I know now... so shameful of what I ought to have tried harder to comprehend, to love someone I loved more than I can say even more because, after all this hell, she held on to the will to live... that I might know her and have a better life...