THE SWEETEST SOUND

　　About 50 years ago, I was a university senior and my mother was 47 years old. One day in early December she said to me showing her arm, “I wonder why my arm is spotted with dark dots.” I looked at her arm and saw several gray stains.

A few days later, when she returned home from a public bathhouse, she said she was shy because a friend of hers said to her, “Oh, my, what is the matter with your body? It is covered with dark stains.” She looked at her body and was shocked. Her friend was telling the truth. She quickly got out of the bath and wore her clothes as soon as possible.

   A few days later, my father took her to Ogaki City Hospital. When he returned home alone from the hospital, he said, “Fumiko (my mother) has been hospitalized.” Then he went directly to the tatami bed room without speaking to me or to my sister any more, and lay there for an unusually long time in a dark corner of the room. I saw him lying like a fetus on the tatami floor. I thought he was tired after hospitalizing her.

   I did not worry about her hospitalization so much. I was more occupied by my graduation exams that were being held in a few days later. I thought she would leave the hospital in a week or two. My sister was also busy preparing for the university entrance exams.

   I commuted for an hour and a half from Ogaki to Nagoya to go to university and returned home around seven o’clock. My father and sister usually prepared meals instead of my mother. We did not speak much at the table.

   About two weeks later, I visited the hospital. I saw my mother in nemaki clothes lying on a bed. She looked normal and spoke normally. As I was cleaning the bed frames and the cupboard with a wet rag, she said:

 “I can’t die before I see my grandchildren.”

   “But I’m only 21,” I said.

   Why did she talk about the distant future? I hadn’t even graduated from university. What she said was irrelevant, I thought.

   A week later, the telephone rang. My father called me from the hospital. My sister and I rushed to the hospital only to find my mother was gasping for breath, writhing with agony, kicking her nemaki clothes, and exposing her thigh. She was groaning. She was unconscious. All I could do was just watch her. I grasped her hand. It was cold. I felt like I was watching a tragic movie. Should I call her, “Mother”?

   “She can’t be saved,” my father said abruptly.

   I couldn’t believe him. Why? She was so alive just a week before. Did death come so suddenly? Unbelievable. Why so suddenly? Why, why, why?

   In less than ten minutes after I arrived at her room, she died. So suddenly.

   Later I learned that my father had known that she would die. He said she died from leukemia.

   Did my mother know she was suffering from the fatal disease? Was that the reason she told me she couldn’t die before she saw her grandchildren? Or she just said it for fun? The former is probable.

   Now I understood why my father, after returning home from the hospital, lay on the tatami floor for an unusually long time. He must have been agonizing over her impending death. He must have wondered whether he should tell us her true condition. He should have, because my sister and I were not children, but on second thought I think he did not have enough courage to disclose such an important matter. I do not blame him. I sympathize with him. How much he wanted to tell the truth to me and my sister. He just couldn’t. He must have thought it better not to disclose the truth. He must have believed she might be saved. What would I have said to her in the hospital if I had known the truth? Wouldn’t my face have betrayed me?

   After the funeral, I heard my sister crying loudly for a long long time in her room. I just sat at my desk and said faintly, “Mother, Mother.” At that moment I realized I was eternally deprived of the opportunity to utter the sweetest sound in the world.