The day I thought about 'grave closing'. With an ultra-early Obon and a neglected cemetery

Ma-ka-han-nya-ha-ra-mi-ta.

The Heart Sutra echoes through the tatami room.
The young priest's voice is unusually high-pitched, ringing sharply in my ears.

Oh, hello. It's Obon. Was I too early?

The calendar still says early July.
It's the middle of a weekday, and the rainy season hasn't even ended yet.
The priest has arrived at our house.

He's thirty minutes ahead of the scheduled time.
I mean, he's early.
Both in terms of the date and the time.

I hurriedly placed the prepared O-reikuzen meal in front of the Buddhist altar.

The only participants are my daughter, who took time off work saying, 'It can't be helped,' and myself.

The young priest offered a stack of sutra books from his bag, but I took two from the top and quietly pushed them back toward him.

I chant the Heart Sutra along with the priest, whose chanting is stuttering like a broken CD player.

Looking at my daughter, she seems embarrassed and is just pretending to chant by moving her lips.


Realizing this is bad, I raised my voice.

Gya-te-gya-te-ha-ra-gya-tei!

A full-throated, impassioned chant.

Back when the previous priest was here, the Obon home memorial service was always held around the time of Obon in August.

Siblings and cousins would gather, welcoming the spirits in a lively atmosphere.
There was a sense of unity as we all chanted the Heart Sutra together.

However, the young priest who took over the position...
Perhaps for the sake of efficiency, he specified a date and time that was way too early.

Who can possibly make it on a weekday afternoon in July!?

The chanting continues.
My legs are going numb from sitting in the seiza position, and...

Just... almost there...
Please, let it end.

All that's left is for him to read the posthumous names on the memorial tablets lined up at the back of the altar, and it will be over.

At this point, the young priest's behavior suddenly became strange.

“Sh-sh-sho??”
“…Huh?”

Can he not read the posthumous Buddhist name...?

He stood up abruptly, stuck his head into the Buddhist altar, and while saying, “Huh? I can’t see it,” he peered at the memorial tablets from the right and the left.

The daughter who had been silently mouthing words until now immediately offered a subtle follow-up.

“They’re overlapping, so it’s hard to read, isn’t it?”

……You should move them, then.

As he was leaving, the priest looked at the neatly arranged food offerings, the eggplant cow, and the cucumber horse, and said,

“Nowadays, it’s rare to find a house that prepares things this properly.”

…Rare?
This properly.
That remark bothered me strangely.

Ever since I was young, I’ve done everything by watching and imitating others.

The food offerings, the Heart Sutra, and cleaning the grave.
I thought that was just what Obon was, and that it was only natural.

And today, I went to the temple to clean the grave.
When I entered the cemetery, there was a large notice posted on the cleaning tool storage area.

“Please take your dead flowers home with you.”

Some people come to visit the grave from far away.
They are telling such people to put withered, decaying flowers in their bags and carry them home on trains or in cars.

Feeling unsatisfied, I picked up the cleaning tools and headed toward my family’s gravestone.

Then, I noticed that the entire cemetery was in a state of neglect.
Withered leaves were piled high here and there, and broken twigs were scattered about.

In the past, volunteers often came to clean the grounds.
That is why it used to be a very beautiful cemetery.

Now, it is unbelievably dirty.
The trees haven't been pruned, and the fallen leaves haven't been cleared away.
I don't see any volunteers either.


Yet, they still insist that we take our dead flowers home with us.

On my way out,
what caught my eye
was an artificial flower stuck in a vase.

On the grave of the dead,
dead flowers.

Perhaps that is the only way it can be now.

And here and there, gravestones are missing, leaving gaps like missing teeth.
Was it always this empty?

Grave closing.

This term suddenly weighed heavily upon me.

After cleaning the grave, I stopped by a friend's house.
She also said, "I have to deal with closing the grave."

She said we have to end it with our generation.
"I can't burden my children with it, and they wouldn't be able to do it anyway."

In our parents' generation, it was taken for granted that children would inherit graves and Buddhist rites.

However, we are different.
While thinking about what to do with our parents' graves, we must also decide how our own lives will end.

I hear that closing a grave costs millions of yen.
Even so, we have no choice but to end it in our generation.

Then she said with a serious face,
"It would be fine if they just scattered my ashes in the sea."

Drifting in the sea, flickering along with the fish.
I thought that didn't sound so bad either.

We send off our parents.
We tend to the graves.
We close the graves.

And then, as if it were only natural, we even prepare our own final resting places.

Perhaps there is no one left who will chant the Heart Sutra out loud for me.

Mio-san introduced this article. She is a wonderful creator who always writes articles from a very unique perspective.