Light walks in the shadows; the world grows dark.
And cold.
And Yama first arrived at this notion in a time different from now when, in the few final weeks before his mother’s death, he would write haibun during his visits to her in hospice in the quiet moments while she slept, which grew in frequency as her death drew near and as the cancer ran in her frail body.
Her breathing was labored.
Her room, cramped. The narrow coffin-like bed on which she lay, her body supine, her head propped up on two pillows.
And still her breathing was heavy; Yama grew to believe it was a burden to her; a way she held on this. A way of staying.
For what reason?
He pondered this. For a while. Then eventually released himself from that burden. From seeking reason in all of this. In seeking reason in the death of his mother.
And he wrote, electing haibun to be a vessel to hold his bitter despair; yet not despair for his mother’s impending death for he’d let her go long before this, but despair at the mechanics of death. That this formally proud woman must succumb to the humiliation of this. Her body was a husk; her mind deep down in the murkiness of dementia where she tread alone.
Her hands were old. One day, as he held her hand in his, he saw they were old, her wedding band tarnished, and she would squeeze his hand and wrap her fingers around the back of his hand that he would later in his life acknowledge were his father’s hands.
And he moved his face to hers, and he looked into her eyes, and she stared back, blankly, looking through him and beyond to the Gates on the border of the Undiscovered Country.
And the Stigmata, even back then, obscured the sun, filtered its hot bright light so much so his mother’s hospice room even in midday shrunk, and she closed her eyes and let sleep take her, the cancer well in her, and, not too much, later, would sleep under the warm bliss of morphine and the final step to unconsciousness.
And Yama wrote his haibun as all this went on around him and it would exhaust him and he read Chimako’s haiku aloud not knowing if his mother heard him, or even cared.
And on the day he was promoted to Inspector, he received the news from the hospice house.
And upon arriving at his mother’s room as the hospice nurse said It was peaceful. I was with her until she died, he paused at the room’s threshold, unsure if he was strong enough for this, his cheeks wet with his tears and joined by the rain that battered the room’s roof.
Before he entered and sat on the bed next to her.
And he took her hand.
Cold hand warms mine
Her breathing…
A burden no more
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