Through The Fire
Death in the Family
By Sharon Yamato
Friday, March 28, 2008

Yamato cousins (left to right): Ron, little Carolyn, me, big Steven, Elaine and Susie, ca. 1956.

A week later, my cell phone rang, and it was his daughter Stacy. I could hear in her voice that something was horribly wrong. She told me that my cousin had just died. Impossible. He just emailed me. We were go­ing to get together and have lunch. He was young – only 63 years old – and he wasn’t even sick!

Steven died suddenly, but peacefully, at his home in the middle of the night. A few years ago, he had a mini-stroke, but despite a little memory loss (and who doesn’t forget things once we hit middle age?), he seemed fine. Luckily, he died the way most of us would like to go. No pain, no protracted illness, no hospitalization, no rest home, no tubes sticking in his arms or machines keeping him alive. The only ones to suffer from Steven’s death were his family and friends.

I used to tease my cousin about everything – from the greasy things he ate to the stupid jokes he told – so I somehow felt this was his way of getting back. “Ai-ya,” I could hear him say. “See, you should have called.”

He must have been smiling at his funeral. An overflow crowd of nearly 500 people came to pay their respects. For a guy who made a living teaching people how to drive and whose biggest thrill was adding another dollar chip to his casino chip collection, it surprised me that there were so many people who knew and loved him. As we sat for 45 minutes watching the endless stream of people going up to offer in­cense, his younger brother Mark (sit­ting next to me) and I made a vow that we would go to each other’s funerals just so that there would be at least a half dozen people in the place. Along with Steven’s many friends from the Optimist Club, Sozenji temple, Heart Mountain Reunion Committee, and countless others, there were a ton of family members that I hadn’t seen in years.

We always say that it takes wed­dings and funerals to bring our family together, but I also realized that it takes a death in the family to make us appreciate one another. When we were kids, I used to secretly hate my male cousins—Steven and his brother Ron—because they had their own car (a ’56 Chevy) and got to take off all the time to go bowling, while we girls were relegated to playing jacks on the tile floor at home. Steven, who was the eldest and the biggest (see photo) of the cousins, barely spoke to me. At one time in my impression­able life, I remember thinking that he was the cool East L.A. guy with the greased hair and duck tail who hung out at the Holiday Bowl, and I lived “26 miles from J-Town” (as fellow Pasadenan and poet Amy Uyematsu described our plight), the square from Pasadena.

Eventually, a time came when we weren’t forced by family ties to get together, and my sister and I started to hang out willingly with the cousins, Steve and his wife Kimi, Ron, Elaine and Carolyn. We met almost weekly and even went bowling. During this time, Steven honed his skills as a corny joke teller. He was quite the showman, never afraid to dress up in costume to add some punch. His Santa and Elvis were pretty funny, but not much could beat his chubby Asian ballerina with a black moustache.

As years passed and we all married, divorced and moved away, we saw less of each other, but Steven always stayed in touch, even miraculously learning one day how to use email. In 1994, he recruited his wife, brother, friend Aki Tanimoto and me to vol­unteer for the Japanese American National Museum’s Heart Mountain barracks project. A carload of us spent an exhausting but hilarious week in Wyoming to dismantle a couple of barracks to ship them back to L.A. It was an experience that reconnected me to my cousins, my parents, and the JA community, and made me realize how important they all are to me.

I guess I needed another wake-up call because as I watched the hundreds of friends and relatives pass by Steven’s casket, I was sad that it took his death to help me see how important our relationships are, and how we often take them for granted. I thought of anoth­er funeral that I was going to be attending on April 5—my good friends’ (Randy and Stacy’s) father, Rick Momii, who I saw only once a year at New Year’s when he presided over the Oshogatsu table, but thought about often as he made periodic trips to the hospital. I never bothered to let him and his gra­cious wife Yasu know how much we appreciated him.
It took these recent losses to hit home how much I will miss the spe­cial people who come into our lives all too briefly. Fortunately, there are still many very much alive who I can see and call. I made myself a little promise to do just that and to have lunch with them—even if they live east of the 405.
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Sharon Yamato writes from Playa del Rey. She can be reached at syamato@comcast.netThe opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of The Rafu Shimpo.