The Angel Of Death In Kansas

My thoughts scuttle across the sidewalk around the blessed feet of Benton, a young man who walks with dark blue polyester strides. His hairless chest peers out through the unbuttoned lapel of his light blue shirt. His long pale blond hair bounces in a ponytail between his small shoulder-span. My thoughts scuttle like early-summer fallen leaves around these feet that stepped into the air one summer day, never to touch the earth with weight again.

I think of his finger tracing with mine whenever I write in Japanese, the way he told me he practiced on misted shower doors, a grey ghost finger of a small hand gently touching my curled fingers. He was in my room and in the backseats of cars in front of me all winter. For months I tried to give him peace.

My thoughts scatter in the wind with the last breath of Aunt Helen, a lady with invisible skin. Her smile is etched with wrinkles from soft “I love you’s” whispered from underneath her last, long sleep. I hold out my hand to a softer side of my grandfather, one touched by the most gentle spirit for 67 years, now to be alone until he lies with her again. My thoughts scatter like the harvest dust to have touched skin that knew such devotion.

My thoughts gather in thunderhead fashion above a wavering summer road where a van speeds to a mistaken burial. There was no warning for this loss, no foretelling of Jeff’s quick passing. He stands thoughtfully in the plaza outside Zendoji Temple in Nagano, Japan. He laughs over a shared meal, witness to one of my high school Novembers. He takes his family to church to be lost in a crowd of people who live comfortably at home while his family longs for home. My thoughts gather in thunderhead fashion for his funeral I missed, for his bereaved son and daughters and for his long-haired widow.

The spirits of the dead are moving in and out of my head, oiling the gears of my mind with emotion. My grief is a dream of transcendence, kindred and compelling, as it is for any old soul. The blossoms smell the same every spring even though nothing else remains. I cannot commune with the spirits of the dead and hardly any longer with the spirits of the living; the blossoms and my grief alone are truly kindred.

One month after I walked back into the world from a week on the fourth floor psychiatric ward at the local hospital I was hired at a nursing home in a nearby Mennonite town. I spent ten months slicing vegetables and preparing gelatin desserts, ten months baking casseroles and serving homemade chicken noodle soup, ten months meeting the elders of Kansas, where I am now a resident.

A few weeks after I started in my new position I received news via email that my fifteen-year-old Japanese student Benton, whom I left behind in Nebraska the previous spring, had hung himself in June. That next month my dear friend Jeff, who had been like an uncle to me growing up, had passed away suddenly, and I had not been able to attend his funeral. While it seemed I had been missing out on the presence of the angel of death, now I had elected to work alongside him in the stark halls of the Midwest retirement communities.

LeRoy and Marilyn, my grandparents in Kansas who did not get to watch me grow up as I was in Japan through those years, have big families and many of my relatives reside in the nursing homes of Central Kansas. My grandpa’s brother and sister-in-law Gib and Helen lived together at the home where I was hired. It was strange to me that I made their dinner every night but saw them very rarely.

Aunt Helen also passed away in July and I attended her funeral. During the ceremony the pastor of my grandparents’ church and the chaplain from the nursing home asked the staff from the nursing home who had cared for her in her last months to stand and be recognized by the community who knew her during her life. The chaplain called each by name as they stood, but I was not recognized. I sat next to my great uncle Del who had graciously offered me his arm when I arrived at the church.

Uncle Del had found me standing alone at the casket of Aunt Helen, who was dressed in the soft blush of cherry blossom pink. The Bible was open on the platform, and streams of her peers and our relatives flowed by, stopping briefly before being ushered into the sanctuary. I was given an idea for a painting then that I would finish a few weeks later, and I was inspired to eulogize Benton, Jeff and Aunt Helen.

It has been two months since I last set foot in the nursing home where I worked, where over the months I had received the news Rubina had died, and Rueben, Richard, Pauline, and others. Expired, sometimes it was written. My thoughts get muddled as I wonder about Hazel, Leona, Everett and Gene. Missionary Ralph Cox passed away that year, whose influence was integral to my parents’ decision to move to Japan, where I was raised. I have met friends recently whose lives have been completely changed by losing someone to leukemia.

I have been learning that residence is transitive for everyone, not just for an expatriate like me. The diagnosis is that we are all dying. In Japanese the kanji character for “house” also reads as “family.” It is becoming my practice to expand my boundaries for each of those meanings and cling less to the compartments of my mind where I sometimes find them tied up and gagged. This demonstrates my desire to honor the urge to grieve and celebrate the spirit of memory, though it is often incited by intense loss.