Chemicals and Electricity, Love and Memory
Three years ago today, my otherwise vibrant, loving mother-in-law died within a month of a cancer diagnosis. That makes March 22nd her meinichi in Japanese, written with the characters 命日, where 日is “day” and 命 means “fate, decree, command, destiny,” and also as it happens, “life.” I find that irony comforting. Death is our destiny, but so is life.
That mysterious cycle: our bodies of matter and water join the elements like clouds formed of moisture that drop rain and snow, which soak into the soil that nourish the plants that bugs and animals eat, which respirate water droplets with every breath and eat other animals and plants, then provide food for other animals and fertilizer for plants, and so on.
This divine mystery would satisfy our Jannie the nurse and master gardener and lover of home-grown tomatoes, and also her widow the resolute scientist Mag: in an accidental voice recording I’ve saved on my phone, Jannie chats about how my then four-year-old son showed her his understanding of numbers. “It’s fascinating, to think about what’s going on in the brain,” she marvels, while Mag remarks, “To think that it’s all chemicals and electricity,” to which Jannie scoffs, “Oh GRANDMA! ‘Chemicals and electricity’?! — you don’t think God has something to do with that too? It’s quite magical.”
A pause, and then Dan their son and my husband’s voice concludes, “And what’s this ‘JUST chemicals and electricity,’ as if that’s such a base and simple and unmysterious thing!” And all three of them laugh out loud.
On the meinichi for each of my three aunties, my widowed uncle in Tokyo visits the family gravesite at the Buddhist temple, washing the gravestone and lighting incense for a few moments every month on the date of their deaths, even for my grandparents who died in 1956 and 1967. When I phoned him the other day, we chatted about Ohigan, the Buddhist commemoration of the equinox. “Ancestral spirits visit when the seasons change,” he explained. I didn’t know that about the equinox, but love the idea behind Obon, the “lantern festival” of summer where people send candle lanterns floating down a river to welcome their family’s departed back to their hometown for a spell.
It’s a lovely image to keep in mind, and today when I watched a mini-documentary about a grief camp for children in Belgium, they happened to decorate paper boats that held little candles they floated down the nearby creek. Some of the children broke down and cried while coloring their boats or watching them float from a bridge where they gathered.
We’re left behind by our beloved when they die, and the mystery of where they go is too complex, too cosmic for our tiny eight-pound brains. The life we carry on this planet lasts for a span (usually too short for our tastes) and it’s the only phase we can experience. But we do know that our beloved’s body (or meat suit as one friend calls it as a blunt-edged joke) gifted its breath and bones to the eternally life-giving soil.
Most important, they left their imprint on us, the ones who loved them. Cheryl Strayed calls divinity “inhabiting another’s experience:” for better and worse, in sorrow and joy, in death and life that carry on.
