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Moon Sealed Red (1)
- Vanderbilt University Press
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121 Moon Sealed Red (1) In a woodblock print called “Kannon on a Lotus Leaf,” Kuan Yin floats at “royal ease,” under the Japanese name and in a male form. An enormous leaf makes a streamlined boat. Bundles of leaf fiber sidle up to bundles of waves, and strands of wavy hair drip over his shoulder: everything reflecting everything else. Propping himself on an arm, he folds a leg flat, in well-drawn perspective. He has pulled up the other leg and drapes a beautiful hand over the knee. The background paper is brown and blotchy, like a lunch bag that got caught in the rain. Remember that narrow ledge where Water-Moon Kuan Yin peered out at the bay? In print after print, the overhang looked hacked, eaten out by wave and wind. The precariousness announced, clearly enough, that this perch would one day let loose. Dad’s “one day” came on 24 February 2006, when he died at home, after almost five years here. This particular woodblock print of Kannon dates from the fifteenth century, but the curator tells us that artists have copied it several times, from pictures in China. Apparently, this falling off ledges happens over and over. When Dad got past the initial shock of the move over the precipice from New Jersey to Hawai’i, he concluded, “It’s [3.234.246.109] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:47 GMT) 122 The Moon in the Water lucky I landed out here with you!”—as if Kuan Yin had picked him up bodily and tossed him over the waves, a beanbag dad. He kept slipping down further notches. After a fall in April 2004, he abandoned his walker. By June 2004, he could no longer sit up at the table and concentrate long enough to put his jigsaw puzzles together. He pronounced mildly, “Well, you just have to let go of some things.” On February 24, Simmy (our amazing helper for the past nineteen months) was here in the morning, and the hospice nurse, Cindy, came by—for the first time—at 4 p.m. When she heard that Dad’s urine had stopped the afternoon before and his bowels were emptying out, she exclaimed, “Hon, he’s going!” She hopped in her car, despite rush-hour traffic, to get a prescription for morphine, in case Dad panicked at fluid filling his lungs. (He never panicked, though you could hear the congestion rattling all day.) This Kuan Yin from hospice then cajoled her boss on this Friday afternoon to agree to a “courtesy pronouncement” over the weekend: a visit from their nurse to confirm the death and to call the mortuary, bypassing 911 and the hoopla. Cindy also persuaded a Kuan Yin of a pharmacist to dispense the peacock-blue morphine: “Oh, I trust her to pay; I know them!” Still, Cindy only gave Dad the first, experimentally small dose before she left. It was approaching the time for me to give a second dose when he died at 8:05 p.m., totally lucid. Reflections on an aging PaRent 123 The whole top half of “Kannon on a Lotus Leaf” is covered with inked characters, and superimposed over the calligraphy hangs a huge red seal. The rim looks like Kuan Yin’s visible moon, right there over the boat. At 6:00, though I knew Dad wasn’t swallowing anymore, I asked, “Do you want a little bit of cottage cheese and banana?” “That—sounds—good!” He ate about two mouthfuls, accommodating as always. At 7:30 I asked, “Would you feel more comfortable if I try to change your diaper?” “Yes.” (Conscientious ol’ bowels, clearing themselves out.) Though he’d been too weak for a couple of months to help much with the changing, this time he miraculously managed to turn, first on one side, then on the other, so I had the satisfying feeling that we were doing a task together: “Man, we’re getting good!” I remember as a young child playing on the cement floor of a mechanic’s garage, while Dad and old man McElven, his early mentor, worked silently, companionably, at some car repair job. The mutual respect hung palpably in the air then, as it did now. When I took the basin of water out and returned half a minute later, he had stopped breathing. He was lying, at royal ease, on the second side he’d turned to, and his beautiful hands were folded around...