After Father's Death, A Writer Learns How 'The Japanese Say Goodbye'

Transcript

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

When writer Marie Mutsuki Mockett's father died unexpectedly several years ago, she became unmoored, lost in deep depression and grief. Her father was American, her mother is Japanese, and it was in Japan's rituals of mourning that Mockett found solace. Her mother's family owns and runs a temple just 25 miles from the Fukushima nuclear power plant which melted down after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Mockett begged her cousin - the temple's priest - to leave. He refused. He told her his community needed him.

MARIE MUTSUKI MOCKETT: To care for the souls of the ancestors so that the living who are left behind feel at ease that the souls of their beloved departed family members are being tended to every day.

BLOCK: It's at her family's temple that Marie Mutsuki Mockett begins her journey through grief, a journey that takes her into the radiation zone, into the homes of tsunami survivors, into Zen temples where she spends hours in meditation. She writes about those experiences in her new book, "Where The Dead Pause And The Japanese Say Goodbye."

MOCKETT: Of course grief is special and private and everyone's grief is unique, and the person that we have lost is unique. But there are all of these wonderful traditions which take individual pain like that and cast it against the backdrop of human suffering, just in general. So for example, I write about something about something called Toro nagashi, which is lantern floating, where during Obon - which is this period in August when the spirits of the ancestors come home - one can go to any number of locations, purchase a paper lantern and write down the names of the people who you have lost, then go to either a river - or in my case, it was the ocean - and put the lantern in the water just as the sun is setting. So when you put your lantern out, you know, it's still sort of light. And then very quickly, it becomes dark. And then very quickly you're aware of the fact that there are hundreds of lanterns on the water and that hundreds of people are mourning their loved ones, you know, and that your loss is one of many, many losses. When I was really intensely depressed and disoriented, I would sit there and think, I just want this pain to shrink, I want it to get smaller. And what I learned was it wasn't really possible for me to miss my father less, but, kind of the world, the backdrop against which I missed him could be larger, which had the effect of making that pain feel less. And the only way to do that was to sort of open my heart up more and have more compassion for other people who had suffered similar losses.

BLOCK: By the end of your book, Marie, you have come to an otherworldly landscape in Japan, it's called Mount Doom. And why don't you describe what it looks like and what Mount Doom is, what it represents?

MOCKETT: Mount Doom is considered one of Japan's most sacred places and it's in the very, very far north of Japan and it is an extinguished volcano. You're met with a really, really strong smell of sulfur, but it kind of signals that you're in another world. You know, you're smelling the inside of the earth. And there are these little pools of bubbling sulfuric hot water that come up in these strange rock formations. There aren't a lot of birds flying around. There's very little vegetation. So it's a very desolate, barren, dead landscape, but it's also eerily beautiful. And there's a river, Sanzu-no-Kawa, which runs from the lake down the mountain and out into the ocean, and this is considered sort of like the River Styx. And there are many stories about the souls of the dead seen walking along this river as they come to the top of Mount Doom and then pause - hence the title of my book "When The Dead Pause" - before they slip into the underworld. And so Mount Doom has become this place of pilgrimage where people who are mourning if they needed desperately to just go to that final spot where they could perhaps catch the person who they miss who has died and say goodbye one more time.

BLOCK: There's something that you learn when you go to Mount Doom from the head priest that there who talks to you, and talks to you about you as a Westerner and how your need to know why things happen may not be really working, may not really help you.

MOCKETT: He was an extraordinary character, sort of severe and serious, who told me with great pride that his nickname when he had been in the monastery for 20 years was Darth Vader.

BLOCK: (Laughter).

MOCKETT: I mean, and what do you do if someone tells you that their nickname is Darth Vader? That's what he said his name was.

BLOCK: You listen.

MOCKETT: And - yes, I did, very intently. And I told him about my meditation training and I told him how irritated I was to have to sit there for three hours, how irritated I was because I had thought that if I wanted to understand anything about Buddhism and what Buddhism had to offer, I thought I was supposed to read sutras and texts and, you know, think, like what I did in college. And he said, oh, you Westerners. He said, you always want to know why you have to do something before you do it. And he said, in Japan we make you do something, and then you learn why afterward. He said, but sometimes you just need to do something and learn the lesson later - which is perhaps a healthier way to live because, of course you can't always know why you're doing what you're doing. Sometimes you simply have to go through an experience.

BLOCK: When the priest told you that about that sort of having to shake off this need to know why, did it change how you were grieving for your father?

MOCKETT: I think so. I think, you know, the Japanese believe that we are connected to our ancestors. And I heard a lot of, oh, your father knows this, your father knows that, your father is watching. And I used to dream about my father constantly and it was always the same dream. He would always come to see me in my childhood room and I would have to tell him that he was dead. And he would look very disappointed and sorry that he had died and then he would go away. And in my kind of Western psychoanalytic mind, I thought, oh, I'm processing the fact that he's dead and that my brain can't accept that he's gone, and that's what I'm doing.

Now I have these dreams about him and he will occasionally show up, and it's always with some sort of very specific and important message. I had a really powerful one last summer where he showed up and he said, you need to be living your life a little bit differently than you are, this is not the way I want you to live your life. And I'm open to this idea that, you know, in however we can explain this, whether it's just a facet of my mind and he's, you know, I'm projecting this onto him when I sleep, that he is still present in a significant way. And if I pay attention to that, the things that I miss about him - his guidance and his wisdom - that's still in me. And that is something that the Japanese believe. And I guess I found a way to believe that and integrate that in a way that works for me, that makes any sense.

BLOCK: Yeah, it does.

MOCKETT: I don't - I'm not one of these people who can believe in a spirit plane or believes that I can actually conjure his spirit or anything truly - truly metaphysical. Metaphorically, I can accept. And that is something I definitely learned from Japan and feel comfortable with.

BLOCK: Marie Mutsuki Mockett. Her book is "Where The Dead Pause And The Japanese Say Goodbye." Thanks very much.

MOCKETT: Thank you so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.