At the end of last month, my mother-in-law (hereinafter mother) passed away and her husband, father-in-law (hereinafter father), passed away just ten days later.
They were both under medical care, father at a nursing home and mother at a hospital, and I was thinking easy to take my daughter in this coming spring break to visit them, but I had no idea they would pass away so quickly. I couldn’t do anything before they died.
My husband and his brother have lived outside Yamaguchi Prefecture longer than they spent in Yamaguchi where they were born and grew up. After they were notified that their parents were in critical condition, there were number of things that they need to decide instantly, and they kept making decisions thinking “father and mother may be more pleased with this way.”
The funeral arranged by their sons through their choices turned to an opportunity to hear from relatives and close friends about how good people they were and to praise their life rather than feel sorrow.
The parents ran their own business and their workplace was at home, so they had stayed together for a long time.
The illness had left them apart, but my husband seemed rather relieved, saying “both of them returned home at last.”
Indeed, their memorial tablets, portraits and urns on the altar in an altar room of the parents’ home looked like a set of hina of dolls of man and woman in the soft spring light.
I was wondering how my first-grade daughter would take a person’s death in front of her for the first time, but she seemed to have accepted it very naturally.
She was involved in the funeral more than expected in her own way.
Looking back, we returned home just once or twice a year because of the distance between Yamaguchi and Yamanashi where we live, and I think I didn’t try very hard to adapt myself to the land of Yamaguchi or to my husband’s family.
But during the fulfilling two weeks of encountering death, I was able to know about my father and mother, and the ancestors who I never knew.
Will my father and mother forgive their disappointing daughter-in-law who finally realised after the funeral the responsibility to connect the ancestors and my daughter?