I was working in Tokyo on Friday when I got a desperate call from my wife, asking me to come down for the weekend. Her father seemed to be dying. We have been dealing with this off-and-on since 2001, so it wasn’t anything new to hear. Then I got a second call from my daughter, who said I needed to come home immediately.
I took a bullet train to Osaka, and was still an hour out when he passed away.
My wife’s father‘s poor health is literally the reason we move to Japan in 2001. Somehow he beat the odds for 18 years. We buried my own father, a surprise death, while we were over here waiting for her father to die. My father-in-law attended many of his friends’ funerals, consistently beating the odds.
Some of you already know that I tried to move back to California in 2012, found a fantastic job at a great company, being paid more money than I ever expected to get paid in my life, and then had to give it up because my wife felt unable to move away from her father in his frail state. I love my career, but I will always put family first. In this case it put a huge goddamn dent in my earnings, career path, and more. In the end, my in-laws tell me that it was my willingness to move back that extended my father-in-law‘s wife an extra six years.
We spent the entire weekend dealing with the funeral. Japan has several stages to a funeral, and the first three of them took place on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. He had been a politician who had received an award from the Emperor himself, and many people owed him sizable favors. Even people who had not been true to what they owed him showed up; some stayed and shed tears, others paid their respects and fled. In all there were well over 1000 attendees. I owed him more than anyone else: I stole his daughter.
I find myself here at the beginning of 2019, now 17 1/2 years after moving back, wondering what to do next. For 1/3 of my life, the lion share of my adult career, so much centered around his existence that I am now missing an anchor, and find myself adrift.