no 30

Have you accidentally looked into the sun or bright light and then looked away, and the image burned into your eyelids? That’s an afterimage.

Last week, I wrote about how culture impacts the way we move through space and the way we relate to each other. I also shared about planning the next five years based on how you'd live the last Five Weeks of your life.

Here's what I saw, heard, or sensed that’s stayed with me in the past week. Let’s begin.

​

More on Swedish Death Cleaning

While I’m a joyful and staunch supporter of purging and being light of physical possessions, I surprise myself on the occasions I long to be surrounded by tchotchkes, knick-knacks that remind me where I’ve been and where I come from.

The Toji Market was on. “It’s the 21st today, a perfect day for tchotchkes,” I thought.

++

After the conversations and meditations on death and dying this past month, I felt called to visit my family’s tomb. When I listened closely, I heard a different whisper: Better visit the living rather than hang out with the dead.

I decided to visit my mother's sister, Aunt Chiaki. We hadn’t seen each other in three years.

She’s the one person in my family who knows all my secrets and is the least judgemental. The market could wait.

+++

My daughter and I doted on Aunt Chiaki by letting her dote on us. After she offered us lunch and tea, we browsed through faded photos of our family. My daughter heard family stories I’d heard as a girl, including stories of my great-grandmother Chika. She had a penchant for kimonos; her impatient husband never understood why she came home with so many kimonos that looked exactly (to him) like all the kimonos already resting in her wardrobe. We remembered my great-aunt Fumiko, who wrote to me from faraway places like Athens, Istanbul, and Paris when she wasn’t busy in the Fuji TV writing room.

​

​

“I have some things for you that belonged to your great-aunt.”

++++

I never made it to the market. My daughter and I were given two pearl strands from my great-aunt, and then we noticed Aunt Chiaki had multiple sweaters of the same cut in her closet. She laughed when my daughter told her, “Maybe you take after your grandmother Chika!” We then offered to help Aunt Chiaki with a thorough Swedish Death Cleaning of her dressing room: a perennial on her to-do list, and something she'd been complaining she didn't have the energy for.

We made an event of it, a little frenzied like ladies on the first day of a clearance sale. We cleared sweater after sweater, each looking like a twin or cousin of the last. We emptied her three huge tansu wardrobes. My daughter shopped Aunt Chiaki's closet, trying on beautiful flared trousers in corduroy and velour, sweaters, and handbags, all in pristine condition. Anything neither she nor I wanted was packed into what became six large boxes for donation and two bags for recycling.

“Vintage!” My daughter beamed.

+++++

My daughter and Aunt Chiaki are connected on social media now. Whenever my daughter tries on something she’s shopped from my aunt’s closet, she sends her a picture. It made me wonder how their conversations will shape future ones– conversations they’ll have after my aunt has crossed over and when my daughter visits the family tombs.

(Again, More on Swedish Death Cleaning here, from the New York Times.)

​