Dear Helen, Dear John,
For months I've been wondering how I was going to write about Japan to you, especially to you, John. I've
written about you both and the war before, and I'm proud that your lives and your stories have helped to heal and uplift people you've never met, decades after your deaths.
Losing your navy buddies at Pearl Harbor, then shortly afterwards having your own ship attacked and declared sunk by the Japanese... seeing men you knew on fire and all that came in the years after until peace was finally declared... Your feelings about Japan make sense to me. That's why I chose the movies
A Majority of One and
After Life for Japan.
A Majority of One is a gentle, humane, and humorous story about an American woman and a Japanese man becoming friends after the war. Both lost loved ones in the fighting and the bombing. Both have reasons to be bitter. Both are good people. While I would have preferred a native Japanese actor to play Koichi Asano, Alec Guinness does a fine job. Rosalind Russell as Mrs. Bertha Jacoby is pure delight. This movie makes me look at my own prejudices. It also makes me want to be a more loving person.
After Life is a Japanese movie that explores the question "If heaven was remembering just one moment of your life, what memory would you choose?" I exited the theater profoundly moved. At the time I saw it, in college, I was grieving a lot: for you, for my dad, for Everett. Every important man in my life had died by the time I was twenty-one and I was reeling from it. I talked about the movie with the lady I lived with at the time and she asked me what memory I would choose. At that time, and for years afterwards, I chose the last time I was with Everett because even with all of the horrible things that were happening at the time, I was so happy that day, so hopeful, and all of you were still here.
This last month I've had plenty of time to ponder that question all over again. As I waited with, and tried to give moral support to my mom in doctors' offices, the hospital, and a surgical center this past month, a lot of memories came back. The smell of hospital soap is always the same and that smell alone opens a pandora's box of memories for me, both as loved one and patient. As I saw elderly men pushing their wives in wheelchairs something inside of me really hurt. How often does that happen, that the husband is still around? Perhaps I've been raised around and befriended by a disproportionate
number of widows in my life, but having the men there late into life is not my personal experience. Sitting in the hospital I wondered, do I really want to get married? To get so close to someone only to not have them in my life? I've seen the lonely up close in the women around me who survive.
That's where you two came in and helped heal my life all over again.
I thought about you, Helen, and Guthrie, who died just after you were married when you both were so young, and how you loved and missed him all of your life, into your nineties. If you were still here, I know that you would tell me that you were not sorry that you married him.
And I thought about you, John, and my dad, and how it hurts when I miss you, but how much hollower and painful my life would be without having you in it, because even with you gone, everything we had and we shared is mine to keep. As I wondered, "Could I handle lingering sick and death once more, with a husband?" I looked around that hospital waiting room and I realized, yes, I could. I've done it. Loads of times before. It's hard. It changes you. It takes chunks of you with it. It can make you hate being awake and afraid to go to sleep, but it is harder to take love and people for granted when you know what it is like not to have them there. I've ultimately loved more unconditionally because of it. I've been willing to do uncomfortable and frightening things because of it. And that morning in the hospital, before the nurse came to take me back to my mother, I remembered that I need to make my decisions out of faith not fear. Faith means choosing love, even knowing that it is intricately tied up in hurt and loss. Because in my lonely that morning, remembering your love still had the power to comfort me.
That's what true love is: protective gear. Love doesn't prevent us from being hurt or knocked down by life, but it does prevent those blows from being fatal to us.
That moment in the hospital is my new, if-you-could-only-take-one-memory-with-you moment because in that moment I felt resilient, I felt strong, I felt loved, and I realized I could do this.
Thank you for being a part of that moment with me, by living the way that you did while you were here.
Tremendous love from the one who made you a great-grandmother and a grandfather respectively,
Melanie
