New Beginnings

Our final move was to La Mesa, just east of San Diego, where I retired in 1999. At the start of last year, she was diagnosed with cancer, which was pronounced terminal. As her physical strength waned, her friends began to visit, all together as a group on Tuesday evenings, to chant. And I couldn’t help but feel that there was something special about this, about these bright, uplifting friends of hers, who concluded every gongyo with a resounding “Yatta!” a typical Japanese cheer that means, basically, “We did it!” I found myself joining in.

Family began to fly in from around the country. They, too, were taken aback by the “Yatta Gongyo Crew,” as we called them, whose arrival always brightened the home. 

One day, I suggested we join them in chanting. Everyone agreed, and from that day on we effectively doubled the Yatta Crew. More than anything, we joined for Michiko, who beamed from ear to ear as we chanted for the first time as a family.

Grief, I knew, would come, but I did not expect it to be so crippling. When Michiko died in December, I found it unbearable even to step outside, to see people going about their lives oblivious to what had happened to mine. 

When the New Year came, I decided to pay tribute to Michiko’s life by attending New Year’s Gongyo, not expecting anything really—certainly not to hear something that felt as though it were addressed to me.

A woman spoke of losing her life partner suddenly. He’d suffered a heart attack while away on business. It was a tragic story, and yet I felt that in telling it, she’d thrown me a lifeline. I was not alone in my grief. Others had suffered trauma as deep as mine and deeper, and had prevailed to resume normal, albeit altered, lives. This woman attributed this to her Buddhist practice.

After this, I continued to go to weekly meetings, able to bear and, yes, enjoy the company of others. I began to leave the house more often and to hike the hills around our home—something Michiko and I had once done together before she’d fallen ill.

I was not in the shape that I once was, and so took a fairly easy climb up a little slope called Dictionary Hill. By afternoon, the marine layer had burned off, leaving the day warm and clear. And I found myself talking—not out loud, exactly, but quietly, in my heart—to Michiko, asking simply, Where do I go from here? 

Half a century in the U.S. Navy had taught me self-reliance, and I could not have imagined, while Michiko was alive, turning to her, or anyone for that matter, so totally exposed, for this kind of counsel. At the crest of the hill, I pressed my palms together and chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo three times and felt that my wife was there with me. Keep in touch with our friends, I felt her say. And keep going. 

Something I’ve done for nearly 20 years is volunteer one week out of every month to build homes in either the U.S. or Mexico, for families. A week after New Year’s, I left to North Carolina, big swaths of which had been laid low by Hurricane Florence. 

My crew’s specialty is framing homes, which marks the beginning of the end of an often yearslong journey of recovery for the family. This project, I noticed, carried deeper significance for me in the wake of my wife’s death, when I, too, was building something new.

I returned home feeling fairly normal, gratified by the work, until I stepped through my front door and was met with silence. I’d managed to believe for a moment that Michiko would greet me at the door. That’s when I felt my own walls falling in.

The following evening, a Tuesday, there was a knock at the door: the Yatta Crew. We talked and chanted and talked some more. I felt significantly better, as always, for their company. Actually, I’d asked them to keep coming by.

We held a service at the end of February, a celebration of Michiko’s life. There, I shared something I’d read with her before her passing, from her mentor, Ikeda Sensei, on the matter of death:

From the standpoint of eternity, there is hardly any difference between a “long” and a “short” life. Therefore, it’s not whether one’s life is long or short, but how one lives it that is important. It is what we accomplish, the degree to which we develop our state of life, the number of people we help become happy—that is what matters. (The Wisdom of the Lotus Sutra, vol. 4, pp. 22–23)

The room was overflowing, with tears, with memories, with laughter. There was no question of the kind of life Michiko had led.

In the weeks and months since, I’ve begun doing morning and evening gongyo, which is when I feel that my wife is there, chanting with me. Study has lent me new perspective on my suffering, which I now understand as an expression of my enduring love for Michiko.

I’ve also stayed close with the friends I’ve made in the SGI, whom I now consider like a family. With them, I’ve discovered a new frame of mind on which I’m building, day by day, a growing hope and determination for a joyful future, which holds new friends, new adventures and new beginnings. 

June 20, 2025 World Tribune, p. 5