On My Father's Death

My father died.

Three years ago he got colon cancer, and even after they removed his entire colon and he was down to skin and bone, he recovered enough to walk on his own just three weeks after the surgery — and then, just like that, he was gone.

He was eighty-three.

The way he died, the phrase "a slow suicide" comes to mind.

Not in a negative sense, but as proof that he had lived enough.

For the last two or three months, he would nod off without realizing it, even sitting on the sofa.He ate less, and he had barely touched water for a long time.

His drinking and smoking, though — those he kept up just fine.He'd been at both since his teens, so he was a hardened veteran.

Last Friday, my mother told us, "He keeps saying he feels sick to his stomach."My sister and I grew worried.

So my sister took him to a clinic for anti-nausea medicine and an IV drip, and I went over to cook something easy to eat — a simple hot pot and some rice porridge.

My mother's legs and back were weak as ever, and she could barely manage on her own, so the two of us worked together.

The next day, Saturday, the nausea still wouldn't settle, so my worried sister and I decided to take him to a larger hospital, and in the end we called an ambulance.

When my mother asked him, "Should we call an ambulance?", he apparently said, "Don't be stupid."So very Showa.

At the hospital they did a blood test, an endoscopy, and so on, and things settled down for a while.

The blood test in particular showed no trace of his years of drinking — the numbers were fine.I had braced myself for something like cirrhosis, but that worry came to nothing.

Relieved for the moment, I went out that Saturday night to dance tango.

I saw friends I hadn't seen in a while, and we talked more than we danced, and since it got quite late, I drove a friend home.

It was nearly half past one in the morning when I got back to Meguro.

That was when my wife called.

"Your father's heart—" she said, and I drove straight for the hospital in Kanagawa where he'd been admitted.

By the time I arrived, he had just passed.

My mother, my sister, and my sister's family had arrived only three or four minutes before me, and they were crying, thrown by how suddenly he had gone.

So I said, deliberately bright, "What a way to go! Even if he'd pulled through and come home, he'd have been off alcohol for good — and he would have hated that."And my mother said, "You're right. He got to drink what he loved right to the very end. That's something to be glad about."

The blood test showed his liver was fine, but his kidneys were working at only about thirty percent, and he was dehydrated.

From now on, what had been waiting for him was a life of drinking water — not a whisky and water, just water.

He lived through the years of rapid growth, rode high in the bubble, and lost everything when it burst — and still, in his later years, my sister and I took him all sorts of places.Even after his fortune was gone, I found him a place to live, and my sister looked after him well.

Last summer, my parents and my wife and I stayed on the club floor of a hotel in Yokohama, and we drank together in the club lounge from early evening.My father kept drinking whisky on the rocks from half past five until half past midnight.

The way my mother tells it afterward: "He was so happy he got carried away and drank too much."I'd wanted to take them again this year, but my mother's health was no longer up to it.

From here on I have to care for my aging mother, and there is no end to the worries.Still, I believe my father lived a good life.That is what our whole family feels.

He is a happy man.