In the last few days I received from friends five letters sent from Japan. They are all full of courage in this time of tragedy in Japan. The last one tells three stories gathered from the morning news. The first story is about a middle-aged lady was visiting several shelters in miserable snowy weather looking for her very old mother and finally finds her in a shelter. On leaving the shelter with her mother she apologies to the others in the shelter for her good luck in finding her mother.
The second story is about a lady looking for her husband’s body remains among hundreds of bodies barely covered individually by a blanket. She finds his body intact and says she feels blessed because her husband looked very peaceful.
The third story third story and the letter author’s ending I will quote exactly.
“In another segment of the broadcast, a reporter finds an old lady standing alone in a narrow path formed in the midst of the field of the debris. Being asked what she was doing there, she said, ‘He never used to fail to come home by dinner time but this time. . . You know this is our house. I can tell it by this tree for sure. That’s why I’m here every day, but he hasn’t come back. What happened to him, I wonder.’ Obviously she knows what possibly took place. The landscape has totally changed and she is commuting from the shelter where she stays now. She hasn’t gone out of her mind. She is struggling to stay normal against the harsh reality or totally unreal reality if you will by trying to re-call, literally, an ordinary everyday occurrence. And this may be the only thing she can do and hold herself together … as a mother. When the interviewer gently asks her, ‘Would you wonder if he is possibly missing?’ To this, she wouldn’t say anything, looking into the distant horizon formed by piles of debris. The interviewer offered a possibility of the TV helping her to find the whereabouts of her son or somebody who knows something about him. He invites her to share her son’s name. She positively says,’I do not let you have my son’s name,’ and covers her face with her hands with work gloves on. In a cracking voice, she says, ‘If I mention his name, I’m afraid he, sort of, wouldn’t come back to me anymore.’
After seven days, it is the time of facing the separation and reunion.
Not everybody is as lucky as the prodigal son and/or his father, here.
It was a natural disaster and nobody’s fault. No reason to repent, though many reasons to regret being unable to stay together.
They have no house to return to. Many of them have no family anymore to wait for their return.
To return, you have to have your original place in its original shape, more or less.
It is a story of the prodigal nature, which took all their property away and squandered it.”
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