Communication Lake

Abstract

March 15, 2020, our last day of “normal life” before COVID lockdown, was anything but normal. It was my late father-in-law's 90th birthday and we went to his graveside with the woman who killed him.All around us, our friends were already closing their doors and trying to pivot to the new challenges of quarantine life. Facebook was filled with posts about waking up at midnight to secure the last remaining online grocery delivery slot, and everyone was desperately searching for toilet paper. The preceding week had been eerie and stressful as my husband, Shel, and I contemplated which of the activities on our busy schedule would be safe to do and which we should abandon. We ended up making silly compromises. We'd honor our ushering shift at a local music venue, but make sure to wear latex gloves and not touch anyone else's ticket. We'd go to the town's monthly gallery walk, but we wouldn't eat any of the refreshments. Turns out, there were no refreshments, and practically no people. In one gallery it was just us and our neighbors awkwardly aware that we weren't hugging hello, feeling the weirdness of shouting at each other from a safe social distance across the room.We offered O. the opportunity to cancel. I knew she was taking care of her mother, who had stage IV cancer. We were healthy, I told her in an email a couple of days before, but I would totally understand if she didn't want to risk the extra exposure. “My mom just passed this morning,” she wrote back. “But I still want to go to the grave with you on Sunday. I know that's what she would want.”In August 2018, O.’s car hit my 88-year-old father-in-law as he was crossing the street in the crosswalk on his way to his daily morning run. Yoshi was a fixture in town, a small Japanese man in sweats with bushy gray hair who waved and smiled at everyone he passed on the jogging path on the nearby college campus and shouted “can't hear” if any of those he waved at tried to engage with him.Yoshi had been jogging three miles every morning for at least 40 years. Afterward he'd stop at the college library to read the Japanese newspaper, which the librarian always saved for him, then go home to cook eggs and fish and seaweed for brunch. Then he'd settle into an intense afternoon of writing. Yoshi was the published author of many novels, mostly psychological thrillers, and had received several prestigious awards in Japan for his work. At the time of his death, he'd been working with a translator to republish some of these books in English, a project that seized his creative juices and likely was a way of continuing to channel the grief he felt from losing his wife, my husband's mother, to cancer seven years before.My mother-in-law had been his first translator, but since she didn't speak Japanese, she had to rely on Yoshi's rough sentence-by-sentence broken English translation and then rewrite the sentences for him. On her death bed, she asked me to promise I would finish the job, so for a year where every day my husband and I worried that Yoshi—a hermit with few friends and scant social support—would be so consumed with grief that he'd drive the car into a concrete wall, I sat twice a week over a cup of steaming green tea at his dining room table and did my best to decipher Yoshi's thick Japanese accent (which he'd never lost despite being in the country for 50 years) and translate his ideas into English. As a writer, I had a lot of opinions on how he was structuring the novel and tried to give him some gentle feedback, which he never took. Nor did he tolerate any sentence tweaking that veered from his original intention. It was a long and frustrating process, but working on the book gave him the will to keep going.When the book was finished, I sent it to agents as Yoshi requested, though I didn't feel particularly confident in the project. One of Yoshi's few family members, a nephew in Japan, said that the strength of Yoshi's writing was in the quality of the Japanese, something that couldn't quite be translated. I sensed Yoshi had an old-fashioned Dickensian way of telling a story—emphasis on “tell” rather than “show,” which was one of the many things we argued about. The query got a few nibbles, but once agents got the first chapter, they agreed with me that there was too much exposition. When Yoshi asked me to translate a second book, I suggested it would be better if he work with a real translator, someone who could understand the true intent and quality of his Japanese and do it justice.O. insisted she hadn't been texting, which her cell phone records later confirmed. But for whatever other reason, she was looking down at her phone and didn't see his small frame in the crosswalk, or the warning light blinking. The first thing she saw was the frail man flying as she hit him. She got out of the car and held his head, she told us after the court case had been resolved and we were allowed to speak with her. Then she added, hoping we wouldn't think that it was too hokey, that she saw his spirit leave and tell her he would be okay and to make sure to take care of her mother.Not that O. thought what she did was okay, or that we did either. For a year, as the case slogged its way through the court, we wondered about this woman whom we knew nothing about, only that she was distraught, and that every time she had to appear in court for a hearing, she had broken down in tears, the prosecutor told us. She had been fully cooperative with the investigation, the prosecutors also said, but because she was an attorney, there were issues with the cell phone search due to attorney–client privilege, and the case was taking forever to resolve. In my mind I conjured up a busy lawyer, working while driving . . . distracted, but also with a lawyer's arrogant self-importance in thinking they're above the common protocol of not using the phone while driving because their work is so important and they have so much of it and so little time.Yet while the event left us reeling, I never wanted O. to go to jail, which seemed pointless. Why “punish” someone further by inflicting a life filled with upheaval, pain and degradation? I assumed she'd been punished enough knowing that she'd killed someone and having to live with that reality every day. Jails might make sense in preventing dangerous people from repeating the dangerous actions they've done, but if we wanted her not to repeat an action like this, it would be enough to take away her driver's license, which had already happened. My husband and I believed in restorative justice, so we asked that instead she be required to tell her story to school and community groups as a true-life warning of the dangers of looking at your phone while driving. This way, she would be constantly reminded of what she'd done, and, more importantly, hopefully teach others to not repeat the same mistakes.Our convictions were tested when we found out she had two previous tickets for inappropriate phone use while driving. Based on her record compared to similar cases, the prosecution, who had been willing to go along with us, changed their recommendation to jail time. My husband and his sister, who were closer family than I was, were willing to go along with a short jail sentence, though neither felt strongly about it. I registered my “vote” against jail, but I didn't feel like I could overrule my husband's family, who'd known their stepfather since they were children. However, the defense lawyers and prosecutors eventually reached an agreement on probation and three years of community service, including the speaking we requested. And it was at this sentencing hearing that we were finally asked to appear and meet O., in December 2019.I spotted her right away on the other side of the courthouse waiting room . . . a thin and pale woman with red hair and a tear-streaked face. I'd been told she was 39, but she looked like she could have been one of my college students. We didn't speak then, though my husband and I kept eyeing her across the courtroom, where a large coterie of friends were offering hugs. And, I admit, there was a greedy part of me thinking she wasn't the one who deserved hugs at this moment, we were. It was a long and emotionally difficult hour before our case was called. I held my husband's hand, both of us feeling thoughtful, a bit stoic, a bit wooden. We'd been asked to read something about Yoshi into the record that my husband wrote: how, at 88 he'd been vibrant with a lot of life left in him, and how his death left a hole in all of us. Though not much of a crier, my husband did break down reading this statement, harder because at the time of Yoshi's death, he'd been angry at us, as he often was—usually for little things, like not being able to get his computer working. This time, it was something about the car registration. Shel had been trying to talk him through renewing online, and he was having none of it. I wanted to simply call the RMV, but Shel kept insisting we were enabling him by doing things he could do himself. I don't remember exactly what had happened, but I think that after a few angry phone calls that ended with one or the other of them hanging up, one of us did call the RMV, and we worked it out. We left Yoshi a message that the new registration would come in the mail—and it did, the day after he died, but he was still angry. Unlike us, Yoshi was a grudge-holder.So, I found myself wondering that day whether Yoshi would be angry that I was feeling sympathy toward the red-haired young woman on the other side of the aisle, as she read her statement, which was handwritten on lined loose-leaf paper.When I learned he passed I did not think I could go on living. I asked God every day if I could go in his place. I asked my Dad how do I go on living? He told me to live my best life for him, for Michihiro Yoshida, and so I am trying. . . . I have in the last 16 months changed my decision making to how can I be selfless and honor Mr. Yoshida. This has allowed me to assist two separate families and house and care for them to protect them from domestic abuse. I do this in honor of Mr. Yoshida . . . . I started volunteering at the soup kitchen. I feel alive again when I am there and this is all because of Mr. Yoshida.I held my husband's hand and sensed he was thinking what I was thinking. When would the court hearing be over so we could give this poor woman a hug? Which we did, a long deep hug, and then we went into the court conference room together and talked . . . and cried.O. said she wanted to visit Yoshi's grave, so we told her we'd be in touch in the spring after we'd returned from traveling, and offered to drive her there since she no longer had a license. The plan had been to have tea at her house first. Though we hadn't locked down yet, I was already nervous about visiting people indoors, but O. had made a special turmeric-based tea and it felt important to accept her offering. I just hoped whatever virus exposure I might be risking would be mitigated by the turmeric. I brought O. one of Yoshi's geraniums, one of the many large halos of blooms that had sat on the dining room table during the year we eked our way through the translation. I had given most of them away, but kept two, one of which I've since propagated into five additional plants, whose flowers remind me of Yoshi daily, as do the paintings on all our walls. In addition to being a prolific writer, Yoshi was also an accomplished artist until he had to stop painting because of arthritis. His visuals are not always pleasant; many of them are gut punches, like the one of an anguished woman holding a baby in front of a tumbling World Trade Center; or simply evocative, like a self-portrait where he's emerging out of a giant brain. But I was happy to give O. something of Yoshi's—not as a reminder of her guilt, but as a reminder of her connection to him.After we drank the tea, we drove O. in our car to the spot where Yoshi's ashes are sprinkled by my mother-in-law's modest headstone in a local Jewish cemetery. I had explained to O. that in Jewish tradition, she couldn't bring flowers, only stones, and I had taken a few special rocks from my husband's collection for the occasion. We sat quietly on an overcast, but warm, early spring day—O. and my husband quietly contemplative while I pulled out clumps of grass that were encroaching on the ground-level headstone. I always feel better when I have earth on my hands.As we sat, that nudgy feeling I'd had in the courthouse returned. Would Yoshi want us to be this forgiving? He was the type of person who'd tell the same stories over and over of people who had insulted or harmed him, his paranoia often leading him into bizarre illusions of random people wanting to wrong him. On good days he could recycle these into his novels, but on bad days, he'd lash out at us with some crazy idea that we wanted to take his money or sabotage his novels. I spent many hours calmly explaining and re-explaining, shouting to get through his hearing disabilities, or writing notes when that didn't work, about how he had totally twisted what had actually happened. Eventually, his mind would clear and he'd realize he'd been mistaken.I'm sorry. Communication lake, he once wrote in a cryptic email.Yet here we were, being friendly with this woman who had killed him. Would he think that we dishonored him? That we didn't care? That he'd been right all along?When we tell this story to our friends, people often act surprised or shocked; they look at us with awe and admiration, as if we've taken one step into sainthood. But neither my husband nor I feel as if we did anything that unusual. We saw a heart that needed healing, and we saw that we had the opportunity to help it heal, to take a jump into the communication lake, bound together by this man we were both now connected to, whose geraniums would continue to bloom in both our houses.It did help to know that Yoshi had always been philosophical about death, and that his fantasy was to die quickly of a heart attack on the jogging path. “I always go out with your phone number,” he told us, “so someone can call you if I die.” O. hadn't quite given Yoshi the death he wanted, but she had spared him the possibility of dying from a long and protracted illness, which he feared greatly, especially having witnessed his wife's long years of cancer. And, not that I believe in karmic payback, but Yoshi was a terrible driver—someone who might have easily harmed someone else if not for miraculous intervention and a lot of luck. And how many of us can say that we've never been inattentive for a second while driving? How many of us will admit to the nanoseconds we might take to answer our phones—or do worse with them—on the road?Yet these all seem like rationalizations and don't bring us to the real heart of forgiveness. Would I have been able to forgive O. if she'd killed my husband? Or one of my children? These are questions I can't honestly answer.After we came home that day, we entered the lockdown and its accompanying deathly quiet of inactivity. We left our house only for daily walks; reorganized our lives to avoid stores and human interaction; stopped going to galleries, concerts, theaters, museums; barely saw our children—all our culture consumption and socialization now confined to the flat Zoom screen. But the quiet leaves time to ponder—if not answer—the question: How can one honor a life taken while forgiving the taker of that life?There's a self-portrait of Yoshi that hangs in my writing space, watching over me as I write this essay. He's seated Buddha-like with drops of water raining down his naked body. On the palm of one outstretched hand, he holds a candle that morphs into a helix with wider and wider circles before disappearing into the ether. This, I believe, is the man Yoshi aspired to be, even if he, like most of us, rarely found himself more than on the far edge of that plane of existence. But this is the Yoshi I appeal to in my decision to forgive O., knowing that in O.’s resolve to honor Yoshi and in mine to find it in my heart to forgive, each of us is taking a step closer to that ascending flame.