Polite Lies Read online

  Above the altar, my stepmother had hung my father’s portrait. It was from ten, fifteen years before his death. His hair was still black, his face much fuller than I remembered from my visit four years ago. In the picture, he was squinting a little into the sun and smiling.

  You never smiled like that at me, I thought. All I ever got from him on my last visit was a dry false laugh, a quick jerk of his head as he greeted me hello, good-bye, see you later—never it’s good to see you, I missed you, I’ve been thinking about you lately.

  My aunt was getting up. I stood up, too, and we walked back to the kitchen without speaking.

  After we left Michiko’s house, Jumpei, Akiko, and I went to a Buddhist temple in Osaka to visit our family grave, where my mother was memorialized. It was April, about a month past the twenty-fourth anniversary of her death. The three of us took a cab to the temple district and got off in front of a nearby flower shop.

  The inside of the shop was dark. A short man in his thirties, in jeans and a white shirt, stepped out of the back room to wait on us.

  “We need flowers for hotoke-sama,” Akiko told him, choosing my grandmother’s word for the family dead: the honorable Buddha spirit. It was odd to hear this word applied to my mother. To me, hotoke-sama always meant a group of people I didn’t know, not a single, specific person whom I still mourned. I would never be able to think of my mother as a generic and benign presence, though that was perhaps the whole point of describing her as hotoke-sama. My aunt had said this word to the flower shop clerk—a total stranger—as a polite and discreet way of referring to the dead without using her name and getting too personal or emotional in public. She was too polite to be anything but businesslike with a stranger.

  It’s impossible to think about the dead we knew without getting personal and emotional, no matter what words we use. I stood behind my aunt as the man showed us the buckets along the wall and told us that we could choose any flower we wanted. There were twenty, thirty buckets; the water inside looked dark, a heady tea of cut stems and leaves. Breathing in the scent, I felt light-headed and sad.

  “We want something with pretty colors,” my aunt said, pointing to the bucket of red roses. “Give me a few of those roses to begin with.”

  “Are you sure?” the man asked, his head tilted to one side in a gesture of doubt. “You said this was for hotoke-sama.” It is customary to use pale, dark, or subdued colors for altar flowers—nothing too bright or cheerful.

  “Oh, it’s been a long time,” Akiko said vaguely. “Not a recent death.”

  “It’s for someone who loved pretty flowers,” I added, stepping toward the row of buckets to join my aunt. My brother stayed behind near the door.

  The man peered in my direction, shrugged, and took a stubby pencil from behind his ear. Pulling a pad of paper from his apron pocket, he waited for me to choose another flower. The flowers are for my mother, I wanted to say but couldn’t. I loved her. Instead, I pointed to the bucket of pink sweet peas whose ruffled petals reminded me of the balcony at our house a long time ago—my mother had built trellises for the sweet peas to climb; hers had bloomed all summer long.

  I am not sure if the rituals of mourning—building and praying at an altar, visiting the grave and offering flowers—are meant to help us express or mask our grief. Expressing something involves making it clearer, both to ourselves and to others. When a mourner in New Mexico builds an altar out of an aquarium, carefully hanging the beaded crosses, silver angels, and saints’ medals from the wire cover, placing the photographs of the dead against the glass and taping them, does his grief become clearer? Whoever drove those Harley-Davidsons to a friend’s grave—did they feel a sharper sense of sorrow while they took the engines apart and removed them, chained the bikes to the rock, or did the action somehow buffer them from sorrow? Can what begins as an expression of sorrow become a ritual of comfort?

  When my grandmother referred to her parents-in-law and her children as hotoke-sama, she wasn’t trying to hide her grief in front of a stranger, as Akiko was in the flower shop. To her, these people—whom she had loved once—had really joined a cloud of ancestral spirits and were no longer to be mourned individually with unresolved sorrow. Maybe after years of offering them food from her kitchen, she had transformed her grief into something milder, even comforting—a part of her daily life.

  All altars—Japanese or New Mexican—do the same thing. They reduce the largeness of death into something easy to contain and tend to: small cups of food, an aquarium of crosses and medals, motorcycles that go nowhere. The altars and the graves help us parcel out the eternity of death into small daily rituals. Both in Japan and in New Mexico, the altars have doll-like or miniature features; the graves are surrounded by a picket fence or divided into concrete family plots. Mourning is a way of placing boundaries on our grief, creating a miniature replica of sorrow that we can manage.

  Growing up in Japan among Japanese Buddhists, I had no idea that traditional Zen Buddhists believe in reincarnation and challenge each other with koans whose only message is “There is no easy answer. Toughen up and look into the indescribable void and work toward enlightenment, even though you can only fail.” Until I met American friends who practiced Zen and read Alan Watts, I thought that all Buddhism was about honoring the ancestral spirits. Hearing the word hotoke-sama as a child, I never thought of its possible original Zen meaning: that at our death, we become one with the universal Buddha spirit manifested in all things. The adults who taught me the word didn’t have that Zen meaning in mind. Our hotoke-sama ancestors watched over us and worried about our health, jobs, grades, and other particulars of our daily lives: my cousins and I were encouraged to place our grade reports (if they were good) on the altar for our ancestors to look at and be proud of. In traditional Zen teaching, even people who are alive—much less those who are dead—are supposed to transcend petty pride about their achievements.

  Faith—whether Zen or Catholic—revolves around what can never be explained or made familiar. We can no more define or explain the sound of one hand clapping, our face before we were born, or why we must kill the Buddha if we encounter him on our way than we can truly understand the mysteries of the Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, or the Resurrection. Faith in its pure form demands that we leap into these unknown truths or mysteries—but this is precisely what we don’t want to do when we are faced with the death of someone we love. We choose ritual over faith. We would rather string beaded crosses inside an aquarium or worship at a doll-house altar and believe that we are doing something for the dead than admit the truth—that there is nothing we can do for them, no explanations about where they have gone, whether they even exist anymore. In our grief, we cannot leap into the unknown or accept inexpressible truths. Even if our rituals seem false, clichéd, or in bad taste, they are the polite lies we need. The real miracle may be in the way ritual can turn our polite lies into truth.

  In my twenties and early thirties, I had nothing but contempt for vague statements and platitudes. To say “Life goes on” instead of scrutinizing your own particular pain, I thought, was to be a coward. I didn’t want to say or hear consolations like “Everyone suffers some tragedy in life” because I believed that a lame statement like that made personal suffering seem generic and trivial.

  In the last ten years, as, one by one, my friends began to lose their grandparents or even their parents, I came to feel differently. Almost no one my age has any grandparents left. Now, I realize the value of platitudes. Just as we need the familiar and comforting ritual of offering food to the dead or watching cacti grow inside our aquarium-altar, we sometimes need platitudes to console each other.

  Truth isn’t always the best thing. Often, it is too blunt, harsh, or out of place. Several years ago, Chuck and I attended the Lutheran funeral of his maternal grandmother. Because she had many children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, the church was packed. The minister began his sermon in a way that we thought was promising—by talking abou
t Hannah’s life, her Norwegian family, her involvement with the Lutheran community in Green Bay, her children. “Hannah was known,” he said, “for her Norwegian sense of humor.” Chuck and I turned to each other and nodded, appreciating the personal touch.

  But before we knew what was going on, the sermon began to take a peculiar turn. After telling one of the jokes Hannah used to tell, the minister abruptly declared, “Of course, our very faith is a joke to those who don’t believe. For them, believing in God is something to laugh at.” He went on about how only the saved—by which he meant Lutherans or at least Christians—could enter heaven because Jesus had gone to prepare their mansion for them. He said that Hannah was lucky to have been one of the faithful. Her family had nothing to worry about; her soul was safe with God.

  In the car driving to the cemetery, Chuck said, “I should write a will. I want to be prepared. What if I died and my parents had a funeral like that? I would be so embarrassed.”

  “You wouldn’t be,” I tried to joke. “You’d be dead.”

  “I’m serious,” he insisted. “I don’t want my friends to come to my funeral and be told that they’re all going to hell because they’re not Lutherans.”

  “You’re right,” I agreed. “That minister should have been more sensitive. He should have expected that we wouldn’t all be Lutherans. Hannah had so many children and grandchildren. He should have realized that we don’t all share the same faith.” I promised Chuck that I would make sure that his parents didn’t have a funeral like that for him. I would hold a party in his honor and we would play his favorite music, drink beer, and tell jokes. We wouldn’t even say that he “passed away,” a euphemism he particularly disliked.

  Hannah’s funeral made me realize that I don’t always want people to tell me what they consider to be the truth. Instead of telling us that only Lutherans were going to heaven, I wanted the minister to tell a polite lie: we were all going to see Hannah again in heaven regardless of our religion, so none of us should feel bad. I understood why Chuck wants his friends to have a beer party when he dies. In a typical Midwestern polite way, his friends would avoid any mention of painful truths and only tell jokes. They would comfort one another with vague and all-inclusive platitudes. No one would feel offended, hurt, or excluded regardless of religious belief.

  Many times since then, I have cringed to hear harsh “truths” proclaimed without consideration. Only a few months ago, at a funeral in a small town in northern Wisconsin, a priest told the three surviving children of the deceased man, “Your mother passed away in March. It’s been two months and now your father has followed. He died of a broken heart. He wanted to join your mother rather than be with you. So now, there is no family home for the three of you to come back to.” Sitting in the back pew, I was appalled. The children, my friends, were only in their thirties and early forties. All of them were crying. They shouldn’t have to hear that their father died of a broken heart because he would rather be dead than enjoy his old age visiting them.

  “So the three of you have no home,” the priest repeated before declaring that the only home they had left now was the church. “You will never be with your parents, and your childhood home is gone, but when you come to church and receive the holy communion, you will be with God in the only home you now have,” he concluded.

  I was angry as I left the church. The priest had no right to say the hurtful things he said, even if he had believed them to be the only and absolute truth. I wished that the sermon had offered something positive and all-inclusive. “Your parents might be gone,” the priest could have said, “but their love will be with you always. You will find a home with each other and with friends who love you.” Maybe statements like these are predictable and clichéd, but I wouldn’t have minded hearing them.

  In the face of great sorrow, I would rather hear a cliché or a platitude that may be a polite lie. When we say that someone “had a good life and didn’t suffer much” or “had no regrets,” it may or may not be true. But I prefer these polite lies to harsh truths—that someone’s father must have died of sorrow or that someone’s mother suffered terribly in the last two months of her illness. Platitudes are just like rituals. I would rather burn incense or offer food at an ugly altar than dwell on what might be the truth: the dead are beyond my ability to console them. In the same way, I would rather say and hear mild words of comfort rather than hurtful truths.

  Maybe it isn’t even a matter of truth versus lies. The platitudes and polite lies we say are not true in the sense of accurate, factual statements, but they make an appeal to a larger truth—the truth of our good will. We want to believe that our friends will get over their grief, that the person we loved had a good life and didn’t suffer, that we will all find our homes again. Sometimes, that is precisely what does happen in the end—what we said as a platitude does become the truth. People do get over their sorrow. Just as we are comforted by the rituals of altars and offerings, we do find hope in the familiar words of solace our friends offer us.

  After leaving the church where my friends’ father’s funeral was held, I walked across the lawn to the fellowship hall to attend the reception dinner. It was a typical Midwestern potluck of sliced ham, cheese, kaiser rolls, pickle relish, cole slaw, potato salad, Jell-O salad. Almost the whole town was gathered there, drinking coffee and eating. Old men and women went up to the surviving children to fill their coffee cups and urged them to take another brownie or lemon square. Food, I realized, was their way of saying what they couldn’t, in words. They offered food and they listened.

  One of the three children, Jeanne, was talking to a small group of people about her father’s recent visit.

  “I bought a condo last year,” she said. “It’s the first house I’ve ever owned, so my parents were very excited about it. My father was an electrician. When he came to visit me after Christmas, he rewired my condo—put in some fancy dimmer switches and things like that. Now, every time I go home and turn on the lights, I’ll think of him.”

  I pictured her coming back from the TV station where she works, opening the door, and touching the light switch. The room would immediately fill up with light, and she would smile to remember her father putting in the new switches, hanging ceiling lights exactly where she wanted them, putting in extra outlets so she could listen to the stereo and turn on the fan at the same time. The priest was completely wrong. Jeanne has a home where she can sit in the bright light and think of her father’s love.

  Driving home in the dark from the funeral, I thought about my visit to my mother’s grave with Akiko and Jumpei. All through that visit, I had wanted to say so much and yet was unable to. After we left the flower shop, the three of us walked in silence to the cemetery, only a few blocks away. The flowers had been arranged into two large bouquets, wrapped in newspaper. My brother carried one of the bouquets; I carried the other. Akiko walked empty-handed, her head bent a little. Although she had called my mother’s spirit hotoke-sama in the flower shop, I knew that my mother would never seem like a benign and distant spirit to Akiko—no more than to me. We could never truly accept or make peace with Takako’s death. I wished that there was something I could say to Akiko so she would know that I, too, was sad and would always be sad. As I glanced sideways at my brother carrying the bouquet, I wanted to tell him that my mother had loved him—just as surely as we were carrying our identical bouquets now, we were both her children. I listened to our footsteps hitting the pavement and regretted that no words would come to me. In the end, there was no way of saying what I wanted to say to them. All I could do was to walk on, carrying the flowers Akiko and I had chosen. We had named the flowers because we could not name our feelings.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A WOMAN’S PLACE

  The spring I bought my first car I stopped at a Dairy Queen on my way home from work every afternoon. I wasn’t particularly hungry for ice cream. I just liked to sit in my car in the parking lot, an ice cream cone in my hand, and watch the procession of
other cars heading home. My car was like a metal-and-glass tent pitched around me. I loved being alone, claiming a little territory out in the middle of the empty parking lot. I couldn’t believe that I had done without a car for so long, until I was twenty-seven.

  I have a different car now, but I still feel the same way. My second car is a two-door sports car: no back seats, scarcely any trunk space. And yet when I travel, with my touring bicycle and mountain bike on the roof rack, my belongings crammed into the passenger’s seat and the almost nonexistent trunk, I can hardly claim to be traveling light. My friend Don teases me about having more junk in my little car than he does in the station wagon in which he drives his three small children. “Your car is quite a habitat.” he says. He is right. It’s a movable home.

  I never felt the same attachment to my house. A few years after I bought my first car, Chuck and I bought a house in the neighborhood we both liked. All the lots in our block had large yards with tall maples and cedars. Because no one put up fences, the connected yards made the neighborhood look like a big park. The house was just right for us: old and quaint, but in good shape so we would not have to do much work. Built in the 1920s, it was a white, two-bedroom Cape Cod—the kind of house real-estate agents describe as “a nice starter home.”

  As soon as I heard that phrase, I began to feel uneasy about buying the house. “A starter home” meant that we were starting something there before moving on to something else. That something was a “family,” or a traditional version of it. Buyers of “a starter home” are assumed to be young couples without children. They “start” a family and, in five or six years when they have too many children to fit comfortably into a two-bedroom house, move on to a bigger place. The expression makes people sound like sourdough bread. The house is a kit or a package for multiplying dinner rolls.