Letters from Kay Leaving
from 14 February 2004 ~

Dear Friend, 

     The emotion when you said "I'm proud of you" has really stayed with me. I'm so glad you call  me one of your very best friends and that you saw the essential in this decision. That insight was echoed in my son's e-mail, sent with Love, "What you're leaving is yours, and yours to do with as you please. If you feel this is the right thing and will allow you to live your life feeling like you did right, then by all means do it. In the grand scheme of things you're probably not actually leaving all that much, and actually going into quite a bit, in spite of the superficial appearance that it will be restrictive. I think the experience gained from it will be anything but restrictive and you will be happier for it. If others are trying to sway you, don't let them. People always want to offer their uninformed opinions. Only you know what's best for you. Kiyosaki calls those poeple 'The nattering nabobs of negativity.'"

     The last two weeks have been the ice-floe break up season . . . the headline in the newspaper, "Kay Resigns," on the same day I got a chill to the stomach and was in bed for two days with the runs. Lying there, I saw the ditziness I'd been worried was early Alzheimer's was actually like the baby's crankiness before starting to walk or cut a new tooth. Work that week had some iffy moments, and I found a new reaction: do something different. I stopped by a yummy ramen shop on the way home from work, which I had never, ever done before and then went to the Attic, which I'd often done. Something was shifting, but it was shadowy, though gaining strength. Something was different.

     Saturday was odd, again; I cocooned, not feeling ill, but tucked up in my bed, not tending to chores, remembering a dream from the night before: a former friend (Japanese) handing me a baby-like bundle in a blue blanket again and again and my handing it back til I finally took it. And over the next 24 hours of the weekend the long neutral-ground journey ended, and, as William Bridges says, "It is when the endings and the time of fallow neutrality are finished that we can launch ourselves out anew, changed and renewed by the destruction of the old life-phase and the journey through the nowhere." Another crack in the ice floe widened; the long neutral zone since retiring, the long journey through nowhere, was nearing its end.

   The next day was the "Aha!" day, Sunday, the phone calls and the talks and the decision that I was the person to take over and take care, that there was no other solution, that I would return to the States and take over the care of my aged Mother.

     Banana Yoshimoto's There is no Lid on the Sea is being serialized in the Saturday paper. I always scoffed at Banana, saying, "her books are great to read because you only need to know five kanji," so I thought the Saturday serialization of her new book in both English and Japanese would be good for my Japanese honing. I read, looked up (more than five) kanji, but it was all "blah Banana" as far as I was concerned, until these two weeks. In the story, Mari goes home to run a summer snow cone stand in her now-rundown home town and Hajime, the daughter of Mari's mother's best friend, who has burn scars on the entire right side of her body from a fire in which her grandmother died 

     Hajime: "When my grandmother tried to shield me that time, I didn't feel any of the heat or the pain. But I do remember feeling the warmth of my grandmother's body, and how she smelled . . . I understood physically, with my body . . . she went on being my grandmother right until the moment she lost consciousness. . . .  And I thought that was really terrific. I savored the drama of it with my whole body. It occurred to me that in the old days, older people probably taught younger people all kinds of things that way, with their bodies, as they were dying. ... This is what living is all about. People keep making more and more and more memories, creating new ones all the time, and we keep swimming on and on through time--but at the same time everything just gets sucked deeper and deeper into this enormous, pitch-black darkness. And we just have to go on like that. Until we die. We just keep creating things to lose them."

     Hajime, a bit later: "Sometimes unexpected things end up surviving in unexpected ways."  This made me think of the third book in Philip Pullman's trilogy, (trilogy: His Dark Materials, now a 6-hour-15-minute National Theatre (London) play); third volume: The Amber Spyglass). Lyra goes down to Hades and releases all the miserable souls and they dissipate into sunbeams, flower petals, grass, tree bark...

     Mari gets it: "It's true, though, Hajime is right--I can't help being swept along in the tide of something, whatever it is, that's much larger than I am. Someday, even this brief moment will become a memory whose recollection will make me cry."

      "And that was exactly it, that's why I liked thinking the way I did ... believing it was a mistake to think I could accomplish anything significant. I'll tend my own small flowerbed and keep it full of flowers, but that's about all I can do. It's not about having ideas that will change the world. I just have to be myself and be the sort of person who can life out her whole life, form birth to death, feeling good about things; a self who lives honestly and can stand unashamed under the sun; a person who can hear the words of the sprits alive everywhere; even under rocks and in the shade of trees. All I have to do is keep living my life, looking at all the beautiful things this world had brought into being, steering clear of anything that would make me want to turn my eyes away. I've just got to live in such a way that it will be okay for me to die."

     All the synchronicity since that newspaper headline of 25 January is such a gift. I'd, of course, like so many, begun to think Bridges was wrong, that one could get stuck in the neutral zone forever, that I'd go on like this.... But the ice really does break up, sometimes with the help of an icebreaker, and the river flows again.

     Now I think I will go watch The Man on the Train again; I love Johnny Hallyday, as I have since 1963, and the film is another bit of synchronicity, of omen, of wonder.  Thank you for being an old friend, as understanding as Manesquier, Milan's new one in The Man on the Train. 

                                                        Kay

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