My aunt Kiyo died three years ago at the age of 102. For most of the last few years of her life, she was no longer herself. It was hard to reconcile the frail, somewhat vacant woman who seldom spoke with the incessantly verbal, independent, and rather bossy dynamo who had presided over the Takahashi family since my grandparents’ deaths in the early 1950s.
She never married, but my mother, Kiyo’s younger sister Tomi, was always careful to share my sisters and me with her. She joined us on birthdays, Christmases, New Years, Thanksgivings, shopping trips, vacations, and other family get-togethers. She was a present-giver, and the first store-bought dress I ever remember having was from Kiyo. She even sewed me a dress once (on her ancient sewing machine, the attachments for which my sisters and I used when we played “dentist” on our visits to Pine, the Victorian on Pine Street where she and my grandparents lived until their deaths). The dress had a red bodice and slightly flared, black-and-white houndstooth skirt with matching Peter Pan collar. Kiyo always had a flair for fashion. The truly impressive thing was that she also made an exact replica of the dress for my doll, Doreen (named after the Mouseketeer).
After my grandparents died, Kiyo moved out of the old Victorian into her own apartment and began taking travel vacations. She once told me that her first plane ride was at the age of forty; which seemed incredible to me, since as long as I’d known her, she seemed to take at least one trip a year to some exotic (to me) place. She loved traveling, art, and restaurants. When we were older, she loved inviting us to lunch. I remember meeting her at the Rathskeller near the Federal Building, where she worked, for a “work lunch.” I wonder why I remember that particular lunch as opposed to others, and I think it must have been the first time I had met her for lunch without other family members present.
She also loved movies and plays. Although it was my mother who instilled in me a love of books, I do remember one book Kiyo lent me after reading it herself: it was a paperback of playwright Moss Hart’s Act One, an autobiographical account of his relationship with his Aunt Kate, who often took him to the theater. I don’t remember how old I was when I read it, but in whatever state of pre-consciousness I was in at the time, even I saw the parallels.
But her greatest gift to me was the stories she told at every family get-together. They were like vivid puzzle pieces of a picture I could not see in its entirety; my family had moved out of Japantown before I was two years old and I did not remember the people she talked about, did not have any of the context that would have helped me locate each piece. I was a product of the War Relocation Authority’s objective of “ethnic dispersal” — a clean slate, wiped of the past: English-speaking and integrated. It took a long time to fit some of the pieces together.
Kiyo outlived most of her friends. She did not go gentle — Dylan Thomas could have written his famous poem about her. She remained stubbornly in her San Francisco apartment, the telephone her lifeline to the outside world. Her Christmas card list would have more names crossed off each year, but she continued to send out cards, like tremulous pings, testing her surviving connections to a bygone era she seemed to be outliving.
We tried to get her help, but she would not accept paid help; so we helped. My sister Susan and I shopped for groceries and cooked her small meals she could freeze and microwave. We got loaves of her favorite breads from the Hopkins Bakery in Berkeley, and Cheese Board scones she loved, vegetables and fruits from Monterey Market, whose founders, the Fujimotos, were friends from Topaz. My sister Joan and I took her and my mom to lunches and dinners, or I sometimes cooked for them at my mom’s house. I took her sheets and towels to launder every week.
When Kiyo was in her eighties, I started doing her taxes for her. Until then, every year, she would take the bus to the Federal Building to get tax forms in duplicate — one to draft in pencil, and one for the final copy in ink. But she had fallen a couple of times, just walking to her neighborhood supermarket, and I worried about her on the bus. In her nineties, she filed away her rent check instead of sending it to her landlord, and I started mailing in her rent checks for her every month.
When Kiyo was diagnosed with dementia in 2008, after falling in her apartment, it was clear she needed more assistance. I tried to sweeten the trauma of losing her independence by bringing her green tea frappuccinos (which she loved) and installing a phone in her new room at a small residential care home that was walking distance from Susan and me.
It took a while for me to realize that the time to get help linking together puzzle pieces was probably past. As her memory faded, and she stopped recognizing us, she lapsed into silence. But still I sat with her, feeding her, in a kind of meditation, learning to read the slightest of nonverbal cues that I interpreted (maybe only in my imagination) to understand what she wanted, what she might be remembering.
In the Takahashi family, Kiyo was the last of her generation to go. When she died, the window she had opened for me onto that pre-internment camp world closed with finality. We were left with a massive amount of stuff — photo albums, dishes, meticulous records of who she talked with on the phone or had lunch with, gifts given and received (she was a medical records librarian in Topaz and an executive assistant at HUD until retirement); souvenirs from world travels, woodblock prints, Ferragamo shoes, kimono — clues of a life with no translator to interpret them.
But I had her stories, and my own memories. And, on a sunny California day that happened to be the third anniversary of her death, I was writing about something else when I suddenly found myself veering off on a huge tangent. I had started writing Kiyo’s story — which I will share in upcoming posts.
Kiyo’s Story, part 2: O–josan
Image © R. A. Sasaki. All rights reserved.
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