Death In The Family

Kazuko Fukuhara 

Saturday night was a long night for us. My wife’s mother Kazuko, who lives in Okinawa, has been going to the hospital for Dialysis treatment. Recently the Doctor found blood in her stool and urine. In order to fix that problem she would have to stop her dialysis treatment. The Doctor was doing his best but with her age and health, it was only a matter of time.

She slept a lot. Her hearing was starting to go. Family, Doctor and Nurses had to talk real loud so she could hear them. She would barely eat anything. My sister-in-law Sonoko and a few other relatives were constantly by her side.

On Saturday night, our time, she woke up very suddenly. She wanted to talk to my wife Mika and so Sonoko called us from her cell phone. With both phones on speaker mode we were giving words of encouragements to her. Due to Kazuko’s hearing problem my two boys were yelling “I Love You” into the phone. The entire room at the hospital was filled with the sound of two boys cheering up their grandmother.

She was very weak but she acknowledged that she heard us. We said goodbye to Sonoko thinking that Kazuko would rest for the rest of the day. We were wrong. Two minutes later Sonoko called again. Seconds after Sonoko got off the phone with us, Kazuko smiled and passed away on August 18, 2012 11:31 AM Japan Time.  (August 17, 2012 10:31 PM Eastern Standard Time) She was 81 years old.

She lived through the Battle of Okinawa during World War Two. As all forms of records and identification were destroyed in the war, she was mistakenly giving a different date of birth as many forms were quickly being filled out after the war. She remembers Okinawa being transformed from a barren wasteland, due to the war, to having huge metropolitan cities all over the island.