The essay about my carer’s life ” Mom, the Writing Witch”

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Here is Mr. Fukui’s essay. He moved to his mother’s house in a southern prefecture from northern Japan to care for her, leaving his beloved wife and cats.

Discovering Calligraphy

My father died in 1994 at the age of seventy. My mom was sixty-six.

Sometime after his death, she discovered calligraphy. I was told that she regularly traveled to a calligraphy class in a town three train stops away on the JR line. She never had a driver’s license, so she relied almost entirely on walking and public transportation. Rain or shine, she faithfully made the trip to her lessons.

Perhaps all that walking helped explain why, even today, her legs remain remarkably strong for someone her age.

Mom had always been a social person. I imagine that while she was learning calligraphy, she was also building friendships. Her interests soon expanded beyond brushwork into the worlds of haiku and tanka poetry.

Tucked among the pages of my mom’s photo albums are countless snapshots: friends gathered around their calligraphy teacher at lively meals, candid photographs taken at calligraphy exhibitions, and smiling group portraits from poetry outings with her haiku circle.

Some of those excursions—known as ginkō, trips taken in search of poetic inspiration—led them to famous landmarks and historic sites across Kyushu, where they posed together, smiling for the camera.

Judging from the dates written on the backs of those photographs, I suspect that Mom’s seventies were among the happiest years of her life. At the time, I wasn’t particularly close to her. Now, years later, I sit with those albums and make my own guesses.

Calligraphy, Haiku, and Tanka: My Moｍ’s Golden Years

When I think back on it, Mom spent much of her life following my father wherever his work took him. She moved with him from Osaka to Kumamoto and managed the household in an unfamiliar place.

My father was devoted to his work and, to put it kindly, somewhat self-centered. Around the house he would hardly lift a finger. Outside of work, his interests were golf and drinking.

In his later years, illness led to repeated hospital stays. Looking back now, I sometimes think that my mom’s years of caregiving may have been harder than my father’s years of being sick.

Then my father died.

In a sense, she was finally released.

After the grief, the loneliness, and the practical business of settling his affairs, a new chapter began. Her beautiful golden years had arrived.

She poured nearly all of her newfound freedom into calligraphy, haiku, and tanka poetry.

The works she left behind are everywhere. Some are framed. Others are mounted on decorative paper strips or arranged in handmade albums. When my father’s gravestone was erected in 2010, the words “Namu Amida Butsu” engraved on its face were written in her own hand. Beneath them is a haiku she composed in his memory.

Even now, traces of her work remain throughout the old family home.

Among her most ambitious projects was a collection of one hundred original tanka poems. She carefully copied each poem onto a traditional poetry card and assembled them into a folded book resembling a Buddhist sutra.

The count reached one hundred, at least. The poems reflected everyday moments that had touched her heart, her thoughts about her grandchildren, and scenes from the changing seasons, all written in soft, flowing kana characters.

Yet nearly twenty percent of the collection remained unfinished. Some poems existed only in pencil. Others were left unresolved, with wording still undecided. Here and there, red editorial marks and underlines hinted at revisions yet to come.

Today, however, Mom no longer works on them. Instead, she sits on the sunlit veranda, taking the book into her hands and quietly gazing through its pages.

The First Signs

Looking back, I think the first time I seriously wondered whether Mom might have dementia was because of her beloved calligraphy.

This must have been about ten years ago.

While looking at a photograph, she suddenly became agitated.

“I worked so hard on that piece,” she said. “It turned out beautifully, but someone stole it. I know who did it. I’d like to kill him. And then he died the very next day.”

It was not the sort of thing I was used to hearing from her.

I looked more closely at the photograph. It showed a calligraphy exhibition. Hanging on display was one of her works, a massive scroll taller than a person. Standing proudly beside it was Mom, dressed up for the occasion, looking as though she were saying, “Well, what do you think of that?”

The story sounded unlikely. Who would steal an amateur calligraphy piece?

I suspected that she had simply misplaced it somewhere in the house.

So I began searching.

Eventually I found the work rolled up and carefully stored away.

When I showed it to her, she merely glanced at it and said, “Oh, I see.”

She didn’t seem especially pleased that it had been found. The matter ended there, leaving me slightly bewildered.

Then, some time later, she looked at the same photograph again.

The story began all over.

The stolen calligraphy.
The thief.
The anger.

And then it happened again.

And again.

Eventually I found myself wondering:

“Could it be dementia?”

Writing, Writing, Writing…

Mom writes.

She writes constantly.

At her day-care center, I’m told she spends most of her free time copying passages by hand. Using collections of sayings and inspirational maxims as models, she fills notebooks made from recycled flyers and photocopy paper provided by the staff. With a brush pen she carefully copies phrases such as:

“Live each day with gratitude.”

Then she comes home and continues writing.

One of her daily rituals is to write a letter to the day-care center after every visit:

“Today will be my last day for a while. Thank you for taking such good care of me.”

She writes the same note every time.

One year someone sent her twenty cans of tuna as a gift. She wrote both the sender’s name and the word “TUNA” on every single lid.

Names appear on household items everywhere.

Across the tops of slippers, in large letters, are either her name or mine. They are no longer suitable for guests.

She labels towels as well. The only danger comes when she uses a brush pen filled with water-based ink. More than once I have unknowingly dried my face with one of those towels and emerged looking like a coal miner at the end of a shift.

A tragic experience.

She labels every jar lid with its contents.

That sounds sensible enough.

The problem is that once the contents are gone, the jar gets reused. A jar lid marked “Pickled Plums” may later contain seaweed relish or something entirely different. Reading the label tells you absolutely nothing about what is actually inside.

But the greatest incident of all involved the washing machine.

One day she accidentally slipped a handwritten manuscript into a bag of laundry she brought home from day care.

Without noticing, I tossed everything into the washing machine.

When the cycle finished and I opened the lid, I was greeted by a blizzard of paper pulp.

The clothes were coated in white shreds.

Restoring both the laundry and the washing machine to something resembling normal took three or four hours.

Mom’s Lifetime Is Still Going

One of Mom’s favorite sayings is:

“A person’s life lasts one generation, but their writing lives on for many. Footprints disappear, but handprints remain.”

As the unfilial son who secretly plans to have all of her creations ceremonially burned when the time comes, I must admit that those words make me hesitate every time I hear them.

Still, I’ve heard that writing stimulates the brain and may help slow cognitive decline.

Mom is ninety-five now.

Perhaps that, too, is part of the secret behind the remarkable length of her own lifetime.

Back when she was in her seventies and working tirelessly on her collection of one hundred tanka poems, she often said:

“I absolutely cannot die until I’ve finished all one hundred.”

The collection remains unfinished.

So, it seems, does Mom.

And life with a writing witch, Mom, who cannot yet die will continue for a little while longer.

 

Written by Fukui
Translated by Yuko MAKINO (staff)