The Seagull's Gardener: My Father's Last Odyssey

The last time I saw my father alive he asked me to write him ‘a good book.’ So frail then, he fixed me with eyes glossed with such sadness I was afraid to ask what he meant. Did he mean a book about his life? Or his obituary?

Two weeks later he was gone.

Throughout his six month slide from robust independence at home to his passing in a Kane`ohe hospice, he faced death by refusing to accept it. He did not go gently into the night as expected of a soft-spoken gentleman. His last two months he was fed through a tube in his side. On his worst days, he fought for air, even while on oxygen. Although he was over ninety-seven when he got his pacemaker, he fretted about outliving his batteries. He swam against the current, fought the outgoing tide, and struggled to dig his toes into the shore of life until his eyes closed for the last time.

I was thousands of miles away in one of the oldest cities in China when my eldest brother left a message. Dad had died. He scheduled the funeral for next week, two days before I could return. My brother would not wait for me.

The lines failed repeatedly each time I called home. I stared up at the hazy sky, such an odd shade, unlike the clear blue of Honolulu. Before me stretched the vast flood plain of central China here at the eastern terminus of the Silk Road, so far from home. So far from my father.

When I was a child, every school day I waited for him to walk home from the 5:10 bus from downtown Honolulu. The crisp smell of his air conditioned office, conjuring images of files and stacks of paper forms, wafted in when he opened the door. After he changed out of his ironed shirt and tie, placed his natty felt hat on the top closet shelf, and positioned his polished leather shoes on the shoe tree, I’d kneel with him in the garden to dig weeds and work the earth before Mom called us for dinner. With hands deep in the soil, earthworms wiggling through our fingers, we plucked weeds and brown leaves under bowers of orchids, plumeria, pikake and Tahitian gardenias. Mynah birds cackled at us and doves cooed in the evening trades.

My father and I had a special bond that time, space, and death could not diminish. But I could not start his ‘good book.' So he appeared in my dreams, each time to teach me one more lesson, to reveal one more truth he felt I needed to know.

Three months after his death I dreamt I had entered an outdoor promenade filled with shoppers wearing bright Hawaiian prints. The shops were colorful, clean, and bright in the sunlight as if only goodness and happiness were allowed here. The trees were lush and green. Flowers bloomed everywhere. My father wore one of his favorite Hawaiian shirts, large flowers on a subtle background of muted florals. He turned from where he chatted happily with his friends, all equally tanned and in bright Hawaiian prints. He looked directly up at me and asked, Did you get my letter? His face shone with a healthy glow. With his eyes twinkling upwards in a smile, he stood and clasped me in a hug.

‘Oh!’ I gasped. I felt the press of his firm chest and the crisp cotton of his shirt against my cheek. He smelled like a fresh breeze, like clouds and angels.

He laughed at my surprise.

I woke up laughing. I hugged my shoulders and remembered the feel of his body against mine. His new scent, which had enveloped me when he held me close in my dream, still clung to my arms and cheeks. Never, I told myself, will I forget that fragrance. In his own way, he was immortal.

I knew he was trying to tell me it was time.

In my father’s last few years I flew home more and more often. Although he lived independently in the house in which he had raised us, a modest home painted white to reflect the tropical sun, the perfect backdrop for a profusion of plumeria, bougainvillea, birds of paradise, orchids and anthuriums, he grew to depend on my return. He greeted me at the airport with lists of house repairs, doctor appointments, and errands. He wanted my company to explore newly opened developments, beaches, and stores. He liked to go to festivals and parades and examine the haunts of his past. I plotted out our visits in detail. But as I flew back and forth between California and Hawai`i and my letters and phone calls increased, I realized I wasn’t the only one coping with this routine.

Conversations with neighbors, friends, and co-workers always touched on how we were caring for our parents, some who lived in other states, other countries. We weren’t alone. According to the Pew Research Center, seven to ten million adults care for their aging parents from afar. And by the year 2030, according to the US Census Bureau, the number of Americans 65 or older will double to over 70 million. We conferred on our parents’ ailments, discussed symptoms and medications, and compared living arrangements and outside help. We felt guilty for not living closer to our parents. We felt frustrated that they did not want to live with us or move closer.

I learned that Death changes family dynamics, changes people, changes their desires. Death reveals the soft underbelly of their soul, their weakness. I kept that painful part of my life cloaked, close to my heart.

I write from my own experience, aware that there are many sides to every story. There is no absolute truth. There are as many variations of the truth as there are unshared conversations and decisions. I changed some names to protect my family’s privacy. If there are errors, the fault is entirely mine.

Hawai`i is a meld of cultures, Asian and Western, mystical and spiritual. For many, one’s passing means a journey onward. For some it is truly the end of the story. My reality may not be yours. Your truth may not be mine.

But I believe the love we hold for each other, a love which rises above all other emotions, sustains us for many lifetimes.

~*~

Prologue

Against the Wave

Woody tracked the waves breaking in even sets, one large followed by a second and third that diminished in a pattern, gentle and rhythmic. The waves curled at the toes of his two boys at water’s edge, then pulled back stranding dozens of jellyfish, the glassine Portuguese-man-of-war that blew to shore eight days after the full moon. The sky was azure blue and a twenty knot offshore wind eased the heat on the sun-glazed sand.

For whatever reason, a change in harmonics or a storm thousands of miles across the Pacific, the wave pattern changed. The rogue wave swelled suddenly, engorged with the power of the sea. It towered so high it blotted out the sun.

His younger son looked up and scrambled up the beach kicking sand in his haste. His older brother dreamily watched the wave crest. It broke over his head and carried him out to sea.

Woody instantly dove into the retreating swell. He grabbed his first-born with one arm and paddled with the other. The two rode the glass-like crest of the wave like fish floats. The next wave carried them towards shore. My father dug in his toes to plant his feet as soon as the wave crashed. A lull, a moment of hope. But the sea sucked the duo back out.

Two Hawaiians, no more than sixteen but experienced in the ways of the sea, their broad backs muscled and sinewy from swimming this beach most of their lives, waved their arms and shouted to my father. The fourth wave in the set was the weakest; they would pull him in then.

My father and brother slid down the curl of the third wave, swallowed water, and gasped for breath. Dad wasn’t a strong swimmer; he got seasick just watching the waves. His only hope was reaching shore before he ran out of luck. He bent his head down again as the wave swept them back in. Intent and calm, he felt his son’s heart race like a baby bird’s. The vast ocean stretched endlessly behind him, dwarfing him with its power. He wailed when it pulled them out for the third time.

The Hawaiians lunged for my father. But the wave was quicker and yanked its hostages from their fingers. Father and son were mere dots on the face of the wave now. All voices hushed on the beach.

The two rode the crest of the fourth wave. As predicted, it curled in huge and sweet. The Hawaiians had already slipped into the surf. When the wall of water crashed over their heads, they grabbed the two and hung on.

~*~

My father lay on his stomach under the shade of a wide-leafed tree. He breathed heavily, deeply, as if all his emotions and heart were gasping for air from that deep space inside him. Water beaded on the knotted muscles of his back and arms. A moan rumbled in his chest. And with each breath he released the terror of the sea until his muscles relaxed and he fell asleep.

I sat by his side watching the beads of water drip from his smooth skin onto the straw mat. I was five years old and he was my world. I wanted to touch him, to ask if he was all right, to assure myself that he was safe. I had screamed when he dove after my brother and fought for their lives. I never doubted he would return. I leaned close and inhaled the comforting scent of his ocean-washed skin.

Only when I heard fear and terror escape in little cries as he lay in the shade did I realize that possibly, my father might be mortal.

~*~

In my callow teens, I went to Honolulu Airport to say goodbye to friends from California my father had met only once before. My friends missed their plane so we returned to their hosts’ house in Wai`alae Kāhala to wait for the morning flight. By then it was midnight and, knowing my parents would be asleep, in a serious lapse of judgment I decided I needn’t bother them. Over our animated collegiate chatter, at five a.m. a strong voice from the dark called my name. When I saw my father standing in the driveway, I cringed. My father said that he had waited up for me. When I didn’t return he got in his car. How did he know where I was? I had mentioned Wai`alae Kāhala and a certain street sign so he drove, guided by an inner sense, through an area of over a thousand exclusive homes and pulled up in exactly the right driveway.

~*~

In my most frightening dreams I race from evil through dark alleys, across jungle valleys, over ragged mountains and endless seas in the nightmare maze of dreams. I flee from plumes of molten lava threatening my jungle village, paddle through shrouded rivers overhung with vines, and race inland from tsunamis. Always, I awaken frozen with fear, heart racing.

In the worst of these, my father plucks me from disaster. He appears as if summoned by an inner sense that I need him. He drives up in a rugged military vehicle or nondescript white sedan, all diametrically opposite of what he drove in real life—a blue vinyl-topped El Dorado and a 1952 Plymouth Cambridge the color of lapis lazuli. I run to him yelling Dad, energized with relief at the sight of his face. His cavalier shrug tells me he’s doing what he’s done a thousand times before when he picked me up from school or piano or ballet lessons.

Then I wake up. How did my father know I needed him?

~*~

My life took me three thousand miles across the Pacific to the fast-paced world of Northern California, so different from the tropical ambiance of Honolulu. Here, I prided myself on my self-sufficiency, my independence. Yet, my father had the power to bring sense and order and security by his presence, even in dreams.

~*~

Part One: The Land of Ghosts in Dreams

The roof of Lefty Chow’s car had to be held down when they drove over the Old Pali Road. Woody is second from the right.

Chapter 1 - Hawai`i 1907: The Kukui Street Gang

My father was molded by the Ko`olau mountains that form the spine of O`ahu, the breath of trade winds sweeping down its slopes, and the waterfalls that fed Mānoa valley where he was born in 1907. As a child, he bathed in chilly valley streams and ran through drifting showers. He walked barefoot to a one room school with his brothers and sisters. In the afternoons, they plucked snails from their terraced taro ponds for their mother to cook for dinner.

Always hungry, he and his brothers shimmied up guava, rose apple, and wild plum trees eating their fill and stuffing their pockets with fruit for their siblings. Once, they climbed to the top of a thirty-foot guava tree. The boys egged each other higher and higher yelling Just one more branch, one more fruit, until the top branches bent, bounced in the wind, and collapsed. Their sisters screamed as the boys crashed through the tangle of branches to the ground where they lay paralyzed, gasping for air.

Their mother ran out in time to see her sons crash to earth. When she saw the oozing fruit staining the trousers she had made from bleached rice bags she wept, Look at your pants--how will I clean them? Sun Mui, married at seventeen to Chun Hon, twenty years her senior, would have a baby every two or three years for the first twenty-five years of her married life. Six survived to adulthood.

We never knew we were poor, Dad reminisced. Mama had a vegetable garden and we ate three meals a day. Everyone else was in the same boat. Every day was an adventure, for they could run, chase, and climb through the untamed valley.

Each December, Chun Hon loaded his wife and children in his horse-drawn wagon and rode the hard-packed dirt road to the local church where the Christians told stories and sang Christmas songs. The little Chuns enjoyed the pageant about Baby Jesus and angels and accepted the presents of candy. They were bemused that each present contained a nickel, for there was nothing to buy in Mānoa valley. But they played with the nickels on the long cart-ride home and for days afterwards until the coins disappeared through the cracks of the wood floor boards. They crawled under the house and retrieved the coins in the dirt but eventually, they were lost forever.

Woody was in the tenth grade when his father died. Chun Hon’s belly swelled until he grew so weak he couldn’t return to work. He lay in bed surrounded by his six surviving children and a wife who knew it was useless to get a doctor; his skin had turned the color of death. She bowed her head to remember the three children she had lost. A torrential rainstorm had drowned the eldest. Two had died in the flu epidemic that devastated the Islands. Woody had been so sick then, so feverish and weak. He was surprised to have survived the pandemic. He thought he was going to die, not his sister and brother.

At fifteen, his duty as the eldest unmarried son was to support his younger brother, sisters, and mother. Woody, as he was called by his buddies, didn’t mind leaving McKinley High. Jobs were plentiful for those willing to work hard. He worked six months as a bookkeeper at O`ahu Railroad where his father had worked as a switchman. Then he landed a plum job, normally saved for graduates of St. Louis College.

As a bill collector for Hawaiian Electric, the freedom of exploring every street and district in a company car in the early 1930s was an adventure. He learned that even the wealthy, surrounded by their manicured estates, ‘forgot’ to pay their bills. Sometimes he was embarrassed that he knew the families. At times, the address he sought was a number on a telephone