Part Three: On death and dying

Part three: (In a time of minimalism and living a simple lifestyle, why do people keep memorabilia?)

Here we standing around are in a room of people, soft conversations and the music keeps playing tunes. We hear over the speaker the country singer wail: “You’ve got to pick yourself up and keep on keeping on”.

Scott says follow me and like a line of school children we followed the leader into the room next door.This room next is 1,200 square feet and is filled with 6 or more round tables and chairs. There are cafeteria tables loaded up with catered food and drinks. Nobody says a word as we scan the room and then we turn and see the cake.

I can’t recall how the cake is decorated only the green and brown icing. On the wall directly above the cake is a display of a white karate uniform, top and bottom belted with Ted’s green belt and brown tips. (Ted had reached the level of one step below brown belt when he stopped training with us, twelve years ago.)

Whoever put this display up of treasured memorabilia was technically off. They had wrapped Ted’s belt around only once.

I said nothing. My husband said nothing and then:

Scott said: “Sensei Judy, I think my dad would have wanted you to fix the belt and

wrap it properly”.

This was in fact a terrible error but the lay person would never have noticed. So the three of us, because of this imperfection leaned in and attempted to make it perfect! As we carefully kept the length of the belt off the cake, we worked together tugging and pulling and fussing and at the same time we filled the room with stories about karate, Scott’s dad, my dad and then Don had some of his own Ted stories to tell.  We also spoke of where we were when we all heard the news of our different father’s passings and then the conversation turned to onward and upward, Scott’s plans for the future and what’s next for him and then we did the same.

It took awhile for us to fix the display and get everything just right and then we stepped back to admire our work. The belt was now correctly wrapped twice around with a perfect knot but there were traces of green icing on the pants.

I said: “Oh know…..we could fix this……we could turn the pants around.”

Scott said:

“It’s okay. Really, it’s okay. My dad would understand. My dad wasn’t a perfectionist but he would get the job done. In fact this looks like something my dad would have done! It’s really okay. Thank you.”

Soon it was time to go as Don and I had a karate class to teach so we said our good bys to Mary and we didn’t mention to Mary about how we fixed the karate belt and the joy of sharing stories with Scott.

On the way home we spoke about impermanence and the appreciation of being alive right now and how wonderful it was to connect after all these years with Scott. 

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