Practicing Dying by Rebecca Suzuki

Both my grandparents died very young. 

My mother thinks it’s because my grandfather would chain smoke in the greenhouse, creating a literal greenhouse effect where my grandmother constantly took in the secondhand smoke. 

My grandfather was still in his 40s when he died from cancer. My mother was in middle school. On my last trip to Japan, my aunt showed me a photo album of my grandfather’s funeral. I didn’t know it was custom for a photographer to be present at funerals in Japan.

There were several photos taken in a crowded room—all the relatives, neighbors, and acquaintances who were guests at the funeral, which took place at my mother and aunt’s house. A photo of a monk praying in the shrine room. A photo of my mother, aunt, and grandmother standing outside in front of the house, cradling a framed portrait of my grandfather. Their faces sunken.

My grandfather was a handsome man—thick eyebrows, sharp jawline, deep dimples. He was always dressed sharply with his dark hair slicked back. He liked to take photos and play guitar. After the funeral photos, my aunt showed me a photo of my grandfather standing in what looked like a studio with his guitar slung over his shoulder—a cheesy one taken in a studio. And then several other photos of him and his friends on vacation somewhere with tall mountains in the background. They were all dressed in suits, as was typical back then when you went on vacation. A candid photo of my grandfather mid-laughter looking down at his camera. It didn’t surprise me that my grandmother fell in love with him at first sight.

But my grandfather was already in love with someone else at the time that my grandmother came into the picture. My great-grandmother didn’t approve of the woman her son was in love with, said that her last name was a source of shame, and encouraged him to marry my grandmother instead. 

So, my grandparents married, but my grandfather never stopped loving the other woman. 

She lived in the neighborhood, so he kept seeing her.

“My mother definitely knew. Actually, she once confided in me. She said, ‘男はこんなもんよ,’ and acted like it wasn’t a big deal,” my mother told me. 

男はこんなもんよ. This is just how men are. 

My mother never saw her father with the other woman, but she knew who it was, because she’d sometimes run into her in the neighborhood. The woman would look at my mother a certain way. Not in the way you’d expect. Not spiteful or jealous. Actually, the opposite. “大きくなったねえ。美人さんやねえ。” You’ve grown so much. How beautiful, she’d say.

“I could just tell from the way she looked at me. It was almost… like she loved me,” my mother told me.

The other woman never married and never had children of her own. I wonder if the glimpses of my mother and my aunt were enough.

I also wonder how she coped after my grandfather died. He was still so young, and so was she.

She would visit him at the hospital when he was sick. In his final days, my grandmother stepped out of the room to give the two of them privacy. 

I recently watched Asura on Netflix, which is written by legendary screenwriter Kuniko Mukōda. It’s set in the 70s and is about four sisters who find out that their 70-something-year-old father is having an affair. And has a child—a son, with the other woman. One of the sisters is horrified when she finds out, and the others laugh it off, not believing it to be true. But they all agree not to tell their mother because they don’t want to hurt her. The viewers eventually realize that the mother already knows. Has known for a long time. Long before the sisters ever found out. She just kept quiet about it and never confronted her husband, to keep the peace in the family. To cling onto the status quo. In one powerful scene, she folds her husband’s clothes and finds a toy car in his pocket. In a fit of silent rage, she throws the toy car across the room, ripping the paper sliding door. Several episodes later, she falls ill from the stress and heartbreak.

There is a dark side to me that sometimes wonders if my grandfather slowly killed my grandmother. The second-hand smoke, the affair.

My mother says that her father was a good father—quiet but caring. A family man. 

Unlike my grandmother who felt hatred towards Americans for showering her hometown with bombs, my grandfather admired Americans. When he was a child, he’d walk up to an American soldier and stick his hand out. The soldier would smile and place a piece of chocolate on his palm. His mother would scold him whenever he came home with American chocolate—said, “毒入っとるでやめとき！” It’s poisoned! Don’t eat it!  but he’d pop it right in his mouth. 

My grandfather liked American cars and houses and boats. Unlike my grandmother, he probably would have approved of my mother’s relationship with my father.

My mother was a Daddy’s Girl. Sometimes, he’d take her out on drives in one of his two cars. He bought her sweets and shiny white boots on Christmas. He bought the family a real Christmas tree too, which was unheard of at the time, especially in the countryside. His was also the only house in the neighborhood to have a telephone and a color television. When Apollo 11 landed on the moon, neighbors spilled out of the doorway of my mother’s house because they came to see it on their television. 

My grandparents’ exotic plants business was doing well, and my mother grew up without a care in the world—at least according to her. 

That all changed when her father became ill. 

My mother had no idea that her father was sick until he was weeks away from succumbing to cancer. Her mother kept it a secret from her because she didn’t want her to feel upset. 

Before my grandfather went to the hospital, he promised my mother to take her to her very first baseball game. A 甲子園 game. One of my mother’s childhood friends had made it into the prestigious high school league. 

“He couldn’t take me in the end. He was too sick to leave the hospital,” my mother said.

She said this to her sister and me on a cabride back to the train station after visiting Zenkōji Temple in the summer of 2023. 

Zenkōji is in Nagano, and some call the site a Mecca for Japanese Buddhists. Visitors flock to the temple year after year in order to walk through the underground passage and touch the “Key To Paradise” attached to the wall along the corridor. Touching the key is believed to grant salvation, but the catch is that it’s pitch black in the corridor, so it’s impossible to look for it. 

My aunt wanted to visit the temple for a different reason. She didn’t mention the Key To Paradise but explained that she wanted to walk through the temple’s underground because it was supposed to mimic the walk to the afterlife. “死ぬ時の練習,” she said. Practicing dying. 

I found it morbid that my aging aunt wanted to do this. When I left Japan over twenty years ago, she was young, always working outside in her wide hat in the 畑 where she grew cucumbers, eggplants, tomatoes, potatoes, watermelon. And if she wasn’t doing that, she was in the kitchen making big meals for the family, or in the living room folding laundry, or in the main room sewing up holes in her children’s clothes. But I noticed during my visit how much she’s aged—her face marked by more moles, the pale skin on her arms not as taut, her inability to walk very far due to knee pain. It felt so sudden. A reminder of all our years apart. 

Was my aunt thinking about death a lot? She is not one to speak so vulnerably, so I could only assume she was. Was she afraid of it? Or was she afraid she’d somehow mess it up? 

Death has always been close to me and my family, as believers in ancestral spirits and reincarnation. Many of my close relatives are no longer living, but I have always found strange comfort in that because I see them as my protectors. When my mother, sister, and I were still living in Japan, we celebrated Obon together with my aunt’s family in late August every year. We welcomed the visiting spirits into the home, and my aunt and mother would say things like, “Your grandmother is next to you and she’s saying hello—say hello back!” and I’d giggle, give my invisible grandmother a wave, and say, “おばあちゃん元気？” Even in the apartments I grew up in in New York City, my mother always set a little shrine on top of a dresser with photos of my grandparents and father, and every day we’d offer them fresh water and a snack. It was my task to take down the offerings in the evening, and before I took it away from the dresser, I’d put my palms together, bow my head, close my eyes, and say, “今日もありがとうございました。明日もよろしくお願いします。大好きだよ。” And I’d translate for my father: “Thank you for today, thank you for tomorrow. I love you.” 

So, maybe this was not such a morbid thing for my aunt to do after all. Maybe it was like practicing anything else you wanted to get right.

When we first arrived at Zenkōji, we were greeted by two muscular, massive wooden statues inside the gate structure —Ungyou on the right and Agyou on the left. They each stood frozen in movement, like someone hit pause during the middle of a Noh performance. One arm raised, fingers extended, hip thrusted to the side. They both wore intimidating expressions—eyes open wide, baring their glistening white teeth. Inside, the street leading up to the temple was crowded and lined with small shops and restaurants. It was lunchtime, so we ducked under the noren to enter a tiny soba shop, where we ordered freshly cut ice-cold noodles served on bamboo racks with salty tsuyu and slippery tororo for dipping. We ate quickly, knowing we didn’t have much time if we wanted to practice dying and make the 7 o’clock train back to Nagoya. When we finished eating, we walked up a slight hill to enter the temple. Its majestic, wooden awning fanned out to the sky and invited us in.

Walking behind my mother and my aunt, I called out to them to turn around for a photo. As I snapped the pictures, I felt excited seeing them side by side like this. Back when we all still lived in Japan, they were always together and chatting in their countryside dialect, distinct from the way they spoke to other people or each other in public. 

After stepping inside, we made our first prayers in front of the saisenbako, tossing in some coins we fished out of our wallets. We took our shoes off to enter the part of the temple with tatami flooring. We walked towards the main shrine, the statues and embroidered backdrop glimmering in gold. Offerings of flower bouquets and pine tree trimmings. Low glowing lamps lighting the area for visitors to awe at. The three of us faced the decorated shrine and sat in seiza with our feet tucked under us. We put our palms together, lowered our heads, and closed our eyes to pray. The smell of ancient wood, tatami straw, and incense entered my nose and took quiet residence in my mind, and with my eyes closed, just for a moment, I felt as though I were a child again, my body small, my heart and energy bursting. 

Standing up after sitting in seiza for several minutes, I felt static pass through my legs. My mother offered a hand to steady me, and I felt a bit embarrassed, like I’d become too American, my body no longer accustomed to this sitting style. We both laughed.

We got in line to enter the underground passage. I looked at the signs posted all around—“absolutely no flashlights allowed.” “No photography!” “Keep your hand on the wall at ALL times.” The warnings, combined with not knowing what to expect, made me feel afraid.

When it was finally our turn to enter, we went down the wooden steps in our socks, slowly and carefully to avoid slipping. My mother took the lead, I went in after her, and my aunt followed close behind. By the time my foot reached the last step, I was encased in a darkness I’d never experienced before. Everything disappeared—the wall, the ceiling, the floor, color, my mother, my own body.

Recently, I’ve been listening to a podcast series called the Telepathy Tapes, which features families with nonverbal autistic children who can read minds. Usually, they can read their mother’s mind the best. In the podcast, the researchers conduct experiments to test out their telepathic abilities. The mother looks at a color or a number or a word on a card, sometimes in a different room from their child, and have the child communicate via an iPad what their mother is seeing and thinking. Without fail, the children are able to accurately guess what the mother is seeing. During the interviews, the mothers admit that when they first noticed their children’s strange ability, they were doubtful and tried to deny it. But eventually, it became impossible to ignore, and they now accept their child’s telepathy. 

In one of the episodes, a nonverbal person says that he did not realize he had a body. And still, at times, forgets. So, his mother touches his hands, and arms, and shoulders, and tells him, “This is your body, this is your body, this is your body.” 

In this place devoid of light, all I could rely on was touch. The temple wall was smooth and warm, as though alive with a heart pumping blood through it. I let my hand lead me and followed every curvature. 

In the tunnel, having lost my body, my sense of place, time, my heart beat hard against my ribs. As though to remind me I still had a living body. Some of my fear dissipated when I reminded myself that I was sandwiched between my mother and my aunt, who were the first people I ever knew. My aunt had been there for my mother at the moment I was born. They had both been my caretakers. They were the trusted adults in my life. But most likely, neither of them would be there when I leave the world. I would not be sandwiched between my mother and my aunt, like I am now, when I died for real.

“This is way scarier than I thought,” my mother said, breaking the long silence. “I really can’t see. When is this over?” She talks a lot, my mother. Especially when she’s nervous. Because we were walking in our socks, her voice was the only sound. There was no one else in our vicinity, because the signs outside suggested staggering groups by a few minutes to prevent people from bumping into each other in the dark. Unlike my mother, my aunt remained quiet. She only spoke when she accidentally stepped on my heel: “Sorry.” 

“I see the light!” my mother shouted. Relief flooded my body, and I propelled forward to reach it faster. My aunt chuckled quietly behind me. 

I followed my mother up the steps, my aunt following close behind me. The main floor of the temple was crowded with people, noise, light. We all stood there for a moment, trying to take it in.

Back in the cab, my aunt, who was sitting in the front seat responded to my mother: “Mom said dad was sobbing in the hospital because he was so sad he couldn’t take you to that baseball game.”

My grandfather wanted to take Rikko, his baby out just one last time.

The car filled with silence. The toxic kind that had the potential to spill poisonous juices all over. I let it sit, careful not to poke it. 

I could read the sharp pain that entered my mother’s heart. I drew in a deep breath to keep my own steady. I knew that looking at her in this moment would destroy me.

So, I looked outside, at all the shops lining up the main street. Most of them looked over a hundred years old, with secret family recipes hidden in a drawer somewhere. 

The cab moved at a steady pace, and the only noise was our bags shuffling on the leather seats.

“そっか。そんなに泣いてたんだ。” 

A tiny hook slipped off. And I knew I couldn’t put it back in place.

The taxi arrived at the station and we quickly reached into our bags to pay, all of us desperate. 

The doors automatically opened, and we were immediately hit with the “homicidal heat,” of the Japanese summer.

We stepped out into the jungle-like humid air and the doors shut behind us, making a gentle thud.

Rebecca Suzuki is the author of When My Mother Is Most Beautiful (Hanging Loose Press, 2023), winner of the Loose Translation Prize. She writes creative nonfiction in a mixture of forms and languages, translates from Japanese to English, and teaches at Queens College, CUNY.

7 August 2025