<Begin Segment 28>

TI: Let's now talk about your life after your father's death. I mean, what was that like now for you? This is, we're talking 1976 --

EBA: '6.

TI: -- so now we're talking post '76.

EBA: Well, that, my dad died on Memorial Day 1976, and from that moment on, the next four, three or four years was a lot of trauma in my life. First of all, I had already gone through a divorce, and then, see, Dad died in 1976, my oldest sister died in 1977, then I had a, my middle sister died in 1980... I'm sorry, no, '78. My mother died in 1980. And it was, it was a huge personal trauma that I went through at that time. In the meantime I also, in 1978, remarried. And so I've been married now to my wife for a little over twenty-five years.

TI: Brooks, before we go there, I just remembered, there's something I wanted to ask.

EBA: Okay.

TI: Did you mother attend your father's service?

EBA: She attended the graveside service. She was not -- by then she was in declining health and was in a nursing home, and she did not attend the service at Japanese Baptist Church but she did attend the graveside at Floral Hills -- or Sunset Hills, I'm sorry, Sunset Hills, over in Bellevue. It was, it was a strange moment to, to, I'm sure for a lot of people to see my mother there knowing the divorce and the estrangement and so forth. And I guess that's where I see her presence there as kind of a reconciliation effort on her part that things were okay and also just to recognize him and for his, what his work did to... And I can't imagine what her thoughts were that were going through her mind. I would imagine she'd be thinking a lot, of course, about her marriage, thinking a lot about the Minidoka years and that whole era, arena of service. But she never talked about it.

TI: At the burial service, how largely attended was that? Was that pretty intimate?

EBA: It was pretty well-attended. We, of course, not as large as First Baptist Church but there probably were somewhere around maybe a hundred people there.

TI: Okay, so, and before we go back to your, your marriage, in these last few years in your mother's life, were you able to ever have a discussion with her about, about, just between the two of you, an intimate discussion about, about the family?

EBA: Honestly, no. At that time I was a great internalizer and she never spoke of anything about her relationship and how she felt. She was a great internalizer, too. I'm sure she must've suffered terribly, not, not really letting loose of that inside of her.

<End Segment 28> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.