The snow-covered branch of the cedar on the tall mountain;
for how many thousand years, gazing at the flower.
Many thanks to Robin Avery for the Calligraphy.
Memorial Gathering for Blanche Yukie Takayama Sasahara
H. Samson Funeral Home, Pittsburgh, PA
November 20, 1998
Speaker No. 2: Ellen R. Sasahara
My words today about my grandmother will be short and pithy, not unlike my grandmother.
Grandma Sasahara was a wise woman in addition to her interest in flowers, homemaking and family. It was in her kitchen on Pocusset Street some fifteen years ago that she advised me about getting along in life. I was being a curious granddaughter, wanting to know where she was born, who her parents were, did she like school, and that sort of thing.
Well, in the course of our two hours of talking and many notes later, I discovered for myself the complicated comings and goings of her life: Wyoming in 1906, the year of her birth, later being sent to Japan after the death of her mother, when Grandma was just six years old, then returning to the States in 1924 after her father remarried and moved to California. Not long afterward, her stepmother died. Grandma chuckled that she didn't have very good luck with mothers. There was her marriage (at age nineteen) and the birth of her children. There was the loss of a child. And there was more.
She recalled most of these events with evenness and clarity, speaking to me around her morning chores there in the basement. But for me, for my sake, she seemed to emphasize certain points of philosophy, supplying hand gestures to punctuate her meaning.
I said my words would be short, so let's get to the pith.
First, Grandma Sasahara's motto: Kongo seki. Always polish the diamond. In her own words, this means: IF YOU DON'T POLISH THE DIAMOND, IT WILL NOT SHINE. No matter how good of a brain you have, you must always be learning and studying hard, keep plugging away, and you will be better than the next person.
Secondly, the fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, which she used as an example of slow consistency getting you somewhere. (And I seem to be following this advice even today.) Again, her words: You just keep working, keep plugging, and you finally reach something. The rabbit, you know, he thinks he's better than the other, so he goes and rests, then the tortoise who keeps working gets ahead of him. They don't teach that anymore. I don't think, even in Japan.
And most recently, just this past June, I was back in Pittsburgh to visit my relatives Aunt Minnie, Uncle Bob, and Grandma. Prompted by a question from my sister Ann, I asked Grandma about her religious practices. What religion was she born into? What religion did her family practice and why? She said her father was raised a Buddhist but switched to Christianity because, among other things, America is a Christian country.
I knew she wanted to be cremated and have her ashes returned to Japan to rest beside her husband's in the family monument in the town of Tomochi, Kumamoto Prefecture, where Sasaharas seem to come from. So I asked about this dualism of sorts.
Her response was, in a voice I wish I could conjure for you now, "Buddhism, Christianity, same thing."
In the end, could it really be that simple?
I will continue to pray for her and Grandpa, and for all of my departed relatives, as they lived and as they live in us.
Thank you.
