Last Sunday, we went to the temple behind our neighbourhood at the height of the cherry blossom blooming weekend to say goodbye to Mabuchi-san.
Mabuchi-san was our next door neighbour. Hers is the house that sits above ours on the hill. She was quite short, like her legs had been cut off at the knees, an effect not helped by her stiff gait. She was a bit of a weirdo, but very friendly, and extremely hard-of-hearing, so every conversation with her was a bit of an adventure, especially for me, speaking across a language gap on top of everything else. She made such an impression that my son called every neighbour he wasn’t familiar with “Mabuchi-san”.
While we interact with our neighbours regularly, especially the older ones who are retired and around more, we can sometimes go a few weeks without seeing a particular one. There’s also not a big brouhaha when one of them dies. We’ve had three or four go over the last six years and only found out about it weeks or months later. So it was with Mabuchi-san. We found out just before going to Canada in December that she had died in October.
We obviously missed the funeral (which is for the best, Buddhist style funerals are somehow tedious and stressful), and it wasn’t until last week that we were able to go and pay our respects. Our neighbourhood temple is called Fumonin and despite the fact that it takes us about six minute to walk there, it’s actually situated almost directly behind our house. In fact, Mabuchi-san’s house actually has a little path to it. She was very attached to that temple, always participating in the festivals and ceremonies there, and I guess we now understand why: the family grave is there.
So we headed over there and did the obligatory washing of the grave, changing of the flowers, and after several attempts to get it lit, the burning of the incense. Rituals surrounding death are really for the living, and not for the dead, but it felt meaningful to go through the motions. In any case, her son, who is now living in the house, will have noticed, so it’s not a futile gesture. It did make me think, though, that in twenty years, it’s unlikely that grave will be tended any more. It doesn’t matter. It’s just a carved rock with some ashes housed inside, but it still makes me a little bit sad to think about.
Well, those are my thoughts.
Mabuchi-san five years ago with Hammy.
