The end of the road in Buddhist Japan
“Maybe she was tired,” I thought. “Certainly, people must get tired when they feel they have seen and done all they are going to, when they feel their best years are behind them. When their children are grown and their children’s children…” I started to feel very old and began to grasp the logic behind the Buddhist desire to break the cycle of life and death, to stop the incessant rebirth. All is nothing, they say. From nothing to nothing. No life, no end to life. No suffering, no end to suffering…
The gloved attendant deftly sealed the heavy ceramic urn containing my o-ba-chan’s bones with a strip of cellophane tape and turned it so we could see her new Buddhist death name written on the outside in Japanese characters. He then placed it in an ornate box, which my father-in-law picked up, and we all turned to leave the crematorium.
As we walked out into the sunshine to board the awaiting shuttle bus, pockets of conversation broke out with a more cheerful tone. True, like at an Irish wake, there had been moments of levity – and a lot of drinking – over the last three days, but they had always been followed by moments of extreme anguish. There were images etched indelibly in my memory of o-ba-chan’s body in the casket, covered with small white flowers which we had placed on her by the armload; of my mother-in-law and her surviving older sister placing their hands on o-ba-chan’s face and wailing inconsolably before the casket was closed and we carried it to the ornate Buddhist hearse. But there was a different feeling in the air now. It felt like the saddest times were over. We had spent ample time with o-ba-chan’s body and offered her our prayers and good wishes. We had seen and even touched her face a last few times. We had even seen her bones and gently laid them to rest by our own hands. There was no sense we had left something undone. Unlike the way I lost my father, who seemed to simply disappear from the hospital and come back in an urn, this time there was closure; and I actually felt sorry for people whose loved one was lost in a way that made the body impossible to bring back home.
And the best part of all is
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