The Call—I Thought I Knew My Family
February 2012
Shizuko is sick, sick to death with this long agony. She lays still, her ninety year-old body motionless. Her wheelchair sits empty. A head pokes in, checking. Waiting for her to die? Or do they look because they care? A roommate whines in the next bed, but Shizuko should be the one requesting help. Now a stroke. Senses leave her body. Rest. The sentence complete. Sleep. Alone again, naturally.
Shizuko was assigned to hospice after spending thirteen years in Golden Cross Nursing Home. Before, she was housed at various state-run institutions, the type you’d see in movies with hundreds of forlorn bodies wandering long, dingy white hallways and rows and rows of beds. For decades, she roamed these halls ceaselessly. She outlived all her roommates.
Her family came as immigrants, picked peaches and grapes in the fields of California, found poverty and racism and yet stayed while struggling to build something. Shizuko avoided the Japanese American internment camps of World War II because she was classified as “retarded,” a derogatory term unfortunately commonly used in the past. Her life was branded with confusion.
A tiny woman, a little over four feet tall and weighing only seventy pounds, she was in constant motion, always relentlessly moving, seemingly endlessly active. Even when limited to a wheelchair, she could be left alone, content to shuffle throughout the structures, paddling the floor with her brightly colored, tiny, kid’s tennis shoes. A life of pain, illness, separation, departure, and return. Like a ghost, perpetually searching for stolen time.
A phone message from the Wildrose Funeral Home. A solicitation call? I dislike and distrust the phone—I farm, work with dirt, orchards and vineyards stretching along the horizon. I talk more to peaches than people because the trees pretend to listen. I find comfort and order in vine rows: their history I understand and accept.