RainStorm

quickly
    to show her that of course she could always count on my bravery,
    but I sensed as children do that something was terribly wrong and
    my fear began to unfold, to spread out inside me.
    "There's been an accident," she said, "and Papa . . . Papa has
    died. Nakunatta no." He's gone.
    I wasn't completely unfamiliar with the concept of death. My
    paternal grandparents had a dog that had died when I was four, and
    my mother had explained to me at the time that Hanzu, Hans, had
    been very old and had gone to Heaven. But the concept that my father
    could be gone, gone, was too enormous for me to grasp. I
    shook my head, not really understanding, and it was then that my
    mother's composure buckled and her tears came flooding through.
    And so that afternoon I made my first real acquaintance with
    death, as the thing that could make my strong mother cry.
    I cried with her then, terrible tears of hurt and fear and confusion.
    And over the weeks and months that followed, as the lack of
    my father, previously such a commanding figure in my life, began
    to take root, my acquaintance with death deepened. I came to conceive
    of it as the wild card in a previously ordered universe, the
    sudden disrupter, the leering, lurking thief.
    It took about five more years for me to complete my understanding
    that there was no more Papa, that he was represented now
    only by increasingly remote memories, like a series of crude cave
    paintings left behind by some long-vanished people. Now death
    was a place, a place to which people disappeared forever when they
    died, a place that gradually sucked away the clarity of memory afterward
    for a similar one-way journey.
    At nineteen, I received the military telegram informing me that
    my mother had gone to that place, as well. Losing her was easier. I
    was older, for one thing. And at that point I had seen, indeed I had
    delivered, a great deal of death, as a soldier in Vietnam. Most important,
    perhaps, I was familiar with the process, the outcome of
    loss. Grief held no more mystery for me than did the bleeding,
    stanching, and eventual healing that accompany the infliction of a
    survivable bodily wound.
    But familiarity diminishes only fear. It does considerably less for
    pain.
    Midori isn't dead. Only gone. Maybe that's why I find myself
    thinking of her, more often than I should. I picture her face, and
    remember the sound of her voice, the touch of her hands, the feel
    of her body. I have no such power of recall for scent, but know I
    would recognize hers in an instant and wish that I could breathe it
    in even once more before I die. I miss her conversation. We talked
    about things I've never talked about with anyone. I miss the way
    she would kiss me, gently, on the forehead, the lids of my eyes,
    again and again after we had made love.
    I still say her name, my sad little mantra. I find in those incanted
    syllables all that I can tangibly conjure of her, and that sometimes
    the conjuring contents me, however briefly. Even if I can't talk
    with her, I can at least talk to her. Something like that. Some consolation
    like that.
    No, Midori isn't dead, but I deal with her memory by approaching
    my feelings as those of grief. My world is paler and poorer by her absence, but isn't this the case whenever we lose a
    loved one? I knew even as a teenager that my life would have been
    richer had my father survived my boyhood. I learned to accept this
    fact as immutable and, in the end, as perhaps not all that relevant.
    Midori wasn't dead, but she was an impossibility, and, for the imperatives
    of my grief, what was the real difference?
    I rubbed my hands over my eyes, wishing for sleep, for sleep's
    temporary oblivion. It wouldn't come. I would have to wait some
    more.
    I sit in the dark of these empty rooms, and sometimes I think I
    can feel the presence of all the others who have done the same before
    me. Certainly the marks are there. The depression in the mattress,
    the line worn in the carpet between the bathroom and the
    door. Or the stains of sweat or saliva on the pillow, if you look beneath
    the case; or maybe of semen, of tears; sometimes of something
    darker, something like blood. I sit, the dark around me close
    but also boundless, and as my imagination slips into the vastness of
    that featureless bourn, I realize these marks are signs, artifacts of
    lives and moments that were but are no longer, like ashes in an
    empty hearth, or bones cast aside from some long ago supper, or