"kiku"
verb
1. hear; listen
2. inquire; ask
Sometimes Japanese kanji does the most eloquent job of defining a certain word or situation.
The other day, I was at one of my schools and I had a break after lunch before my next class. My desk and the desk of the "office lady" face each other and are pushed together, edge to edge. We were both at our desks, I was studying from my Japanese language text book and she was going about her regular office duties. At one point she says to me "Nanshee-san", I look up and the next thing she says to me is "my father died". I saw the sadness in her eyes that Sean has been seeing in mine for the last 6 years and I was really shocked by this and her news. There have been few turning points in my life but I can tell you for sure that this was one of them. I felt jolted out of my skin by her words and I understood that I was going to feel the effects of my father's death differently from that point on.
Regardless of all the struggles I have with Japanese I felt I already knew the flow and language for the conversation I was about to have with this woman. So much more can be conveyed about concern and understanding with simple gestures and body language than any words I know. The simple act of listening takes on a profound importance when the person you are listening to needs to be heard in order to start or advance their healing. Telling someone of your loss is the greatest catharsis. She told me of the circumstances surrounding her father's death, the nature of his illness and the sudden onset of his symptoms. The "medical" terminology was far beyond both of us to translate so there was a flurry of dictionary flipping for a while. I thought it might help if I shared my experience so I told her "my father died too". She had many questions and the two of us sat flipping through our dictionaries again, sharing our stories in short sentences and eyeballing the Kleenex willing it to keep our eyes dry from a distance. I admire her courage to start this conversation with me. We barely know each other and she opened up so freely, without a care that the language was a struggle and all this only 3 days after her father's death. I was definitely not capable of this level of composure 3 days, months or even years after after my father died. I hope that she felt a bit better and less "alone" after talking to me. She has a long road ahead of her.
As for my road. I've long had the suspicion that I buried too much of myself that day we put my father in the ground. It was enough of a tragedy to loose my dad but the fact that I lost so much of myself is inconceivable. For years I was asking "when will I get back to my old self?", but I realize now that that is simply not possible. I think the loss of a loved one, especially a parent changes you forever and you have to accept those changes and continue to grow from there. I've been in some sort of emotional purgatory for the last few years and it's been well, hell. I was listening to everyone else but not to myself. Geez, that sounds flaky but what the heck I can write whatever I bloody well feel like. So here I am feeling kinda of good, kind of scared but feeling none the less, which is a good thing. Most importantly, the road ahead looks a lot more inviting and I'm not trying to forget where I came from or what I've been through.
