Hiroshi Takahashi passed away just a year after I left Placer County, in 1971. He was seventy years old and died in the grocery in San Jose where he had worked all those years after returning from the camps. I never met him, not a single time, and yet I felt I knew him somehow and drove up from Pasadena for the funeral, picking up my grandmother on the way. She and Mrs. Takahashi had kept in touch some, exchanging holiday cards, and so it was my grandmother who had informed me of Mr. Takahashi’s passing. It had not been particularly long since I had last seen Mrs. Takahashi, of course, only two years, and yet under these circumstances it felt as if I had not seen her in a good long while. I realized soon after pulling into the parking lot that I was actually anxious at the idea of seeing her again. The last time I had been quite literally a wreck, and while I had managed to keep sober in the gap between our meetings, I remained ashamed and mortified that she might think of me in terms of that day when I wept and wept at her kitchen table as she fed me reheated enchiladas, a meal intended for her husband’s pleasure. That I did not meet him, I realized, was yet another disappointment in a life that already seemed, at age twenty-three, filled to the brim with them. That she greeted me like an old friend, like a nephew she loved and had not seen in too many days, gave my heart a mighty lurch. She ran her fingers through my hair, told me I needed a haircut, and gently prodded my stomach. “Are you eating enough?” she asked me. “Do I need to bring you some enchiladas?”

My grandmother passed away three years later, quietly, in her bed in that house in Newcastle. My mother and her sisters fought over her will and the house was quickly sold and what profit there might have been disappeared between them. My first novel was out by then and Gran had at least seen a copy of it before her death. Only after she was gone did I understand that she had been the most important person in my life; she had been there by my side during the worst of the implosion of my soul, had summoned me back from San Francisco and had ministered to me and taken care of me and continued to call me every few weeks all through the years to follow. That those calls would no longer come felt a blow to my heart but one which, at least, felt natural and reasonable. She had been eighty-five years old and that seemed enough. I could not imagine myself living half that long, although now, not quite at the midpoint, I have a better imagination for the future.