While 'my father's death' is sad, death itself is not

On May 24th, I had a meal with my daughter's fiancé's parents.
We agreed that if they weren't going to have a wedding ceremony, they should just register their marriage soon, so they registered it on the 26th, an auspicious day.
That night, I received a call from the hospital saying my father, who was hospitalized, had become unconscious.
On the 27th, my sister and her husband and my mother went to visit him.
As expected, he did not regain consciousness. His blood pressure was said to be normal.
Late that night, around 11:30 PM, I received a call from the hospital.
His blood pressure had dropped rapidly. They wanted me to come immediately.
I headed to the hospital while contacting my mother and sister.

At the hospital, the nurses were desperately continuing heart massage.
My father had held on, hoping to at least wait until his son could arrive.
However, they said that continuing any further would only cause damage to his body, so I asked them to stop.
At 12:17 AM on the 28th, my father passed away.
Immediately after that, my mother and my sister and her husband arrived.

My father passed away as if he had waited to see the marriage registration of my daughter, his own grandchild, and as if he were waiting to boast about it to me.

Of course, that couldn't be the case.
There is no way he could have conveniently become unconscious and passed away like that.
However, it is the privilege of the living to be able to assign meaning to things.

After that, he was moved to the funeral home's mortuary, and the arrangements for the wake and funeral proceeded smoothly.
Since my sister and her husband work in that field, I was able to leave it to them.
It is good if you have someone like that nearby, but for those who don't, I recommend making arrangements for as many details as possible while you are still alive.
So as not to trouble the bereaved family.

Ninety years old.
Considering that the average life expectancy for Japanese men is 81, he lived a long life.
People talk about the 100-year life era, but only a small fraction of people can actually live to be 100.
Don't be misled by the 100-year business.
You might inadvertently feel like you will live to be 100, but that is definitely not the case.
The possibility of dying before that is far greater.

I will not write about my father's hardships.
People of that generation have all experienced hardships to one degree or another.
However, I do intend to write eventually about the hardships he endured for his foolish son.

My father probably doesn't know that he has died.
If so, whose is this 'father's death,' a death that even the person himself does not know?
No matter how much a person struggles, they cannot experience their own death.
It is the same as not being able to see one's own appearance.

A person cannot see their own appearance with their own eyes.
At best, they can only infer it from the image of an 'other' that is not the self, seen in a mirror or a photograph.
However, that is not the self.
In the same way, a person can only look at the death of others and infer their own death, assuming that their own death will be something like that.
However, that, too, is not their own death.

When you think about it, people are born, struggle through life, and in the end, die without knowing anything about themselves or ever seeing themselves. Moreover, they don't even know their own death.
This absurdity.

In the first place, when in a person's life does 'death' occur?
To say one is dying means they are about to die and are still alive.
To say one has died means they are already in a state of being dead.
Death itself has no duration.
That is why it can neither be seen nor felt.

Originally, people should not be able to see lines or points that have no area.
Naming them as lines or points is merely a temporary convention.
The word 'death' also originally has nothing beyond it.
It is merely pointing to something temporary.
Between death itself, which cannot be seen, and the word 'death,' there is a discrepancy and fluctuation that will never align.

Isn't that true of all words?
When you call the glass in front of you a 'glass,' does it truly match?
There must be a discrepancy there that, while approaching identity infinitely, can never fully overlap.
Nevertheless, without the word 'glass,' you cannot see a glass as a glass.

While thinking about such things, the arrangements proceed.
The 'father's death' that occasionally comes to mind is sad, but if I think about death itself, it is not sad.
Someone's death is a sad thing, but death itself has no emotion.
One's own death is a terrifying thing, but death itself is not scary at all.
That is why people think about death.
To escape from sadness and fear.

From the wake onwards, it is a ritual.
It is a ritual by the living, for the living.
In the first place, there is no way Buddha determined the number of times to offer incense.
Originally, corpses were probably just left lying around.
However, if you leave them nearby, wild animals will gather, attracted by them.
Then, there is a danger that we, the living, will be attacked as well.
So, we took them as far away as possible and buried them to hide them.

That must have been the beginning, anyway.
Whoever turned this into a business is a genius.

My mother is the chief mourner, but because of her advanced age, I gave the greeting on her behalf.
For an ad-lib, I think I did a decent job.
On the day, it was raining from the morning.
'Thank you for coming in such bad weather' is the standard phrase.

Generally, the weather on the day of a funeral is either extremely hot, cold, or rainy.
The pattern is set.
So, I thought it would be something like that.
When I went outside to head to the crematorium, the sun shone through the clouds.
I involuntarily let out an 'Oh'.

What is the difference between bones burned at a crematorium and bones left over on a battlefield?
There is no longer any such thing as individuality.
In the end, people disappear, becoming something abstract called bones.

There are still administrative procedures, the 49th-day memorial, and the interment of ashes remaining, but for now, I think it is safe to say that my father's story has ended.
My father's story has been quietly placed on the bookshelf.

If you encounter the death of someone close to you in the future, why not try stepping away from 'that person's death' and thinking about death itself in order to escape the sadness?
'That person's death' is sad, but death itself is not sad.

I am sure I will think about the 'death of my father' many times in the future, but whenever that happens, I will try to shake off the thought of 'father' and focus on thinking about death instead.

Besides, I am not sad all the time.
When there is something to laugh about, I should just laugh.
That is what I think.