The Other Side

This morning I saw a man with gray hair pushing an umbrella stroller stacked with junk, wearing mismatched clothes and talking to himself. Three months ago I texted a picture of him to my sister-in-law. He was stumbling precariously close to the curb on a busy street where cars sped by, looking hypnotized as he leaned to the side like a question mark, staring into the night. That time he was wearing a sports coat, perhaps something plucked out of his father’s closet, looking out of place dressed up for dinner instead of standing high as a kite near an intersection known for prostitution. 

I was waiting at the traffic light on my way to driving a kid here and there when I snapped the photo of him in his trance, having been struck by the pathetic sight of this person who I had only heard secondhand stories about from my deceased husband. I sent it to my sister-in-law, who was the only other person I knew who would know his story. My husband told me that the guy was a bully to them as kids. He was also the son of a gardener, also Japanese-American, and happened to live two streets over from my husband’s childhood home, the same home where I am raising our three kids. I’ve watched this man over the years wandering the streets, homeless, observing him from afar and noticing when he came around to check in with or maybe asking for money from his elderly father. I’ve always been the person who notices things (some may call this nosy, I call it observant!), and I’ve watched the elderly father putter around his meticulously groomed front yard for over a decade on my walks around the neighborhood with the kids. I marveled at his gardening skills. His grass, like my father-in-law’s, looked like a carpet of green, so pretty it should have been in your living room instead of outside. His planters were filled with sago palms and other perfectly pruned plants, also like my father-in-law, which felt like a tiny portal into the life of my own home before we lived there, back when my father-in-law took care of the landscaping, when the grass also looked like beautiful carpet instead of St. Augustine in various shades of brown and green. It has been a while since I’ve seen the elderly man, but I’ve noticed Brian— that’s the bully’s name—hanging around more at his dad’s home, junk piling up, the beautiful front yard now a jungle. I suspect the old man has passed away, another one of the dwindling breed of Japanese gardeners to pass on. 

At one point, it was estimated that one in every four Japanese American men were gardeners in the United States. Most Issei came from agricultural parts of Japan, like my father-in-law, and gardening was an attainable path of employment for them in this country. My father-in-law mowed lawns up until a few years before he passed away in his 80s. When he died, some of his richest clients, which included a prominent car dealership in the area, recognized his decades of service to them with almost nothing. One person gave him a book. It’s a thankless job, but they took pride in their work, and my husband used to tell me stories about all of the services they had to do for customers, which today’s gardeners do not provide. It was full-service. You were there to keep the gardens looking meticulous, not just do a quick mow job and blow the clippings into the street. I imagine there aren’t many Japanese gardeners left. Future generations were encouraged to reach for more, and I think the legacy for people like my father-in-law was that their children and grandchildren would never have to do that back-breaking work.

Except for Brian, a Nissei anomaly. He didn’t reach for anything.  

“One of the saddest thing I’ve ever seen,” I texted to my sister-in-law the night I saw Brian staring off into an abyss, watching him look as if he were lost in another world. This 60-something year old man roaming the streets, taking clothes from his dad’s closet, pushing baby strollers he found.

“He was a bully,” my sister-in-law said. “But I feel sorry for him.” 

“He’s probably just suffering from grief,” my oldest son speculated as we floated our theories about why we’ve been seeing Brian so much, and why he kept wearing a strange assortment of what can only be described as his father’s Sunday best often paired with sweatpants. “He probably can’t handle his dad dying.” 

Maybe. But I feel like it is something bigger than that. He had been homeless and using for decades. There was grief, but it wasn’t one thing. And for that, I empathize with him.

But sometimes I can’t wrap my mind around how people like this former bully can have multiple lives— multiple chances— one day looking like he might fall into the gutter and get squished by a car, and the next pushing stolen strollers with pep in his step like it’s his job to be the garbage man. Meanwhile, people like my husband died young. Children get sick. Others who did everything they were supposed to do are struck by terrible tragedy.

A month after I sent that text, my sister-in-law unexpectedly passed away. There was nobody to text this morning when I saw Brian pushing the stroller. Nobody who would know the story. Another piece gone. How mind boggling it feels to one day text a person, to the next day them being gone. Even though I’m not a stranger to this, it’s a feeling I think the brain will always grapple with. She’s gone, and Brian’s still foraging for junk, having never done anything meaningful in his life. My husband is gone, but his bully still gets to squander his precious time getting high one more time. There is no grievance department for this injustice. 

Sometimes I think if I ever happen to run into him in the neighborhood— maybe I’m walking, and he’s walking— I might say, “Are you Brian?” And maybe he would be alert enough to ask me how I knew his name, and maybe he’d actually remember my husband’s name or my sister-in-law’s name or maybe a nugget of a detail to share from elementary school days or something about the neighborhood, as if he weren’t their bully or as if his brain wasn’t fried and as if somehow that little interaction would reignite a time and place that was slipping away from me, buried deep in the slush pile of meaningless human activity, but for a split second I’d feel validated that someone else remembered them too. Yes, I’m down to an unstable man who roams the streets who might hold an insignificant crumb of a memory that would rise to the surface of a world increasingly devoid of my loved ones’ existences. 

Instead, I watch Brian from afar. As I’m taking the kids to school. To kendo. To soccer. To orthodontist appointments. My life hums on, and there he is, walking the streets, stuck in another dimension he has never figured out how to escape. 

And I’m fascinated by him. I don’t know him, and he doesn’t even know me or that I know about him, but he teaches me something every time I see him.

He teaches me fragility.

Also: you can have a lot of time and do nothing with it. You can have a short amount and exceed expectations. It’s not about the time. Time is not the point.

In the middle of Brian’s night on the curb and my sister-in-law’s passing, I received a layoff notice along with almost 300 of my teacher colleagues, as if I needed another reminder about fragility and everything being gone in a second. For weeks, we agonized and tried to wrap our minds around how someone with 20 years of teaching experience could possibly be let go, another one of mental snares that we step in when reality crashes into our expectations when we least expect it. 

I watched my colleagues spin in circles, a deep fear of the unknown like a dark cloud hanging low and hiding the sun, obstructing our view of tomorrow. It takes a second for our lives to change course. A split second for something to crash into our reality like a bull in a China shop. 

We said goodbye to my sister-in-law, laying her to rest in a niche behind my husband’s, the cemetery increasingly a curio cabinet of our loved ones. We asked ourselves hundreds of times how this could be true. We had just seen her. I’ve re-read her last text dozens and dozens of times, keeping it in the highlights of my phone as if somehow that extends her existence. It couldn’t be real, right? Sometimes I still catch myself hoping my husband will come home too, even after all of these years. It’s too absurd to be true. And yet, it is. She’s gone. He’s gone. I imagine our home when my father-in-law bought it brand new on his gardener’s savings, raising his young family from scratch here. Those little kids growing up, going through the same cycles my own kids are moving through, riding their tricylces around the cul-de-sac and getting tucked into bed in the same rooms where my kids sleep. You blink and it’s over.

My layoff notice was rescinded. Relief, but reality still stings like scraped knees that will take a while to heal. There will be scars. Many of my colleagues still battle through protracted hearings, and I get goosebumps thinking about how close the fire got to me. I know in my bones that it could still happen, and that truth has changed me. Like death. I know intimately it is always there, even when we can’t see it. I escaped this time, but will it get me the next time?

The ordeal inspired a dharma talk I gave at my temple: What To Do With Our Worry? After I gave that talk, I was reminded that we all carry inside of us many worries. People are going through terrible things. And it’s normal. Worry is a normal reaction. But what we do with our worry is our power. In Buddhism, there are three big teachings that can be applied to worry. I don’t actually think it is unique to Buddhism, but we emphasize it in our practice. 

First, everything is impermanent. Your favorite chocolate cake, having your favorite people in your life, your brand new car, and even your career. That’s the bad news. You can’t keep everything you love. The good news is that the bad times also don’t last. What you are worried about today will soon be an insignificant blip on your radar. Probably not even a blip. Can you remember what you stressed about on this day 20 years ago? 10 years ago? 5 years ago? 2 months ago? Trust that it won’t last. For better or worse. 

There is also the concept of non-self. We attach labels to ourselves and think they are us. There is an Aesop’s Fables story about a crow and a peacock. The crow wants to look like the peacock, so it collects peacock feathers and decorates its body with them. Then the crows feels like it is as beautiful as a peacock. But then, a strong gust of wind comes in and blows off the feathers. The wind is impermanence. The crow is now just a black crow and feeling disappointed. The lesson is that we can try to be a lot of things, but attempting to craft whatever version of the self is ultimately going to lead to our suffering, because these labels aren’t real. Layoffs are scary and they can economically destroy us. But we aren’t just defined by this one job we have. There are other paths to take. Somebody said, “I’ve been ousted at a few places, and each time I landed somewhere better.” I think this is a healthy attitude. Having a belief that no matter what happens, you’ll get to the other side even happier and better. I think that takes experience, confidence, and trust to get to that point. I also think it takes a willingness to step into really scary places and holding faith that there is light on the other side.

Finally, non-attachment. This is related to no-self. We attach ourselves too much. I’m attached to my classroom. The idea of leaving my classroom, this place where I met the teacher next door and married him, this place where I taught in agony when that teacher died, this place where I’ve grown up for the past 18 years at this school—I have a lot of attachments. If they kick me out tomorrow I’ll be upset. But we’re not supposed to attach ourselves like that, because again, it inevitably will lead to our suffering. Impermanence: I will not keep this classroom forever. It is not even mine. Even in the best scenario, I will retire one day and leave that classroom. Impermanence: this won’t last forevever. No-self: I’m not just a teacher who teaches in this classroom. It is not who I am, it is one aspect of me. Non-attachment: I have to be able to let go, especially of the things I can not control. It’s just one example, and I hope I don’t get kicked out of my classroom, but if I ever do, I have to be prepared. I’ll need to be mentally resilient. One thing is for sure: there will be more obstacles. More tragedy. More injustice. Many more ways our hearts will break. Prepare your glue, because you’ll be picking up the pieces and gluing it back together until you die. Consider it a badge of honor. A privilege. A sacred ritual of the battlefield.

Also: going through this together. We are not alone. Being there for others is one of the most important contributions you can make in this world.

This past week, we observed the day my husband died 8 years ago with a trip to the cemetery. I did more to honor this day last year. We wanted to watch one of his favorite movies (Indiana Jones or Star Trek), but it didn’t happen. Too busy. Too tired. This year I’m empty. It’s that time of the year, at the end of a long spring season filled with too many obligations and too much rain and death and layoffs. May comes and I crash, crawling into June. I read my journal entries and essays from last year and it’s predictable. Same story, maybe a little less stressful because I knew it was coming. It’s probably just the season I’m in. I say it all of the time, but being an only parent is the hardest work I’ve ever done. You have no idea until you are truly alone and responsible for children (three in my case) without their other parent. There is a mental, physical, and emotional toll. I’m exhausted. Eight years! And also, fulfilled. It doesn’t seem possible that the two can coexist, but they do. I have much to be grateful for. I’ve had these eight years with these kids. That’s a tremendous gift my husband did not get. Still, I wouldn’t be human if my mind didn’t think about the what-ifs. What if he was home right now and could do the dishes for me? What if he could see his daughter play soccer? What if…? Like my father-in-law’s gardening legacy, I suspect it’s not an experience necessarily validated with tangible gifts or praise, but rather the feeling you have knowing the seeds you planted and tended to would produce the fruits of tomorrow. This is your contribution. You did your job. Your blood, sweat, and tears invested into the future, giving rise to new life. There is no reward proportionate to the effort it takes to achieve this goal. In this way, you live on through others. You are never really completely gone.

Next week, I would have celebrated my 15th wedding anniversary. It lands on Mother’s Day this year. I have to admit that this year feels harder than a lot of other years, especially as I see others celebrating this milestone. I feel left behind, more than knee deep—chin deep—sometimes eyeballs deep—in the choppy waters of having to do all of this on my own, yet so many years have passed and one might conclude that this should be easy at this point. The thing is, it never gets easier. You just get better at living with it. I feel like a hot mess living with it, but I’m giving it my all, and that’s all I can do. So onward I go with it, because that’s what you do. That’s what I talked about in my worry dharma talk. The only way out is through. And hopefully, you get to ride the highs and persevere through the lows, and when it is all said and done, you can say it was worth every second. You came out on the other side better for having experienced all of it.

And that’s a wrap for this season. Summer is on the other side!!

Hugs to everyone going through something right now. Just keep swimming. I know it is all so impossibly hard. The silver lining is along this arduous path, there are glimmers of joys to claim. Claim the heck out of them. You earned them. Be greedy with joy.