<Begin Segment 28>

TI: So a little bit earlier we talked about how your mother had, I think, bronchial cancer or lung cancer.

RM: I think it was after that that I think she, she, I guess, couldn't find enough to do, so decided to go back smoking. And her excuse was that it reminded of my, reminded her of my sister, but on the other hand, watching her smoke was a very trying experience because she'd, she'd kind of light up and then she'd, she didn't know how to smoke. She was just inhaling enough that it affected her bronchia, just her, the tubing in the lungs. And it wasn't going down into her lungs. In fact, I mentioned in the story, again, that Dr. Bower who did the surgery on my mother to take out the infected portions of her lung, told me, he says, "You know, Mr. Mori, your mother's lungs are like a country girl's. They're pink, shows no hint of any tobacco. It's only in the bronchia that... and that's the root of the lungs," he said, "and so I can't take that out because without the bronchia you can't, you can't breathe." But her lungs were just fine. But my wife just went through, well, last, three and a half years ago, she had breast cancer and the surgeon removed her lung, I mean, removed her breast and along with it twenty lymph nodes in the area of her chest, all around her arms, and all twenty lymph nodes were infected. And they have a radiation that they call gamma, which I think is the radiation they get from radioactive isotopes and they plant it into the machinery and they program it so they can hit exactly certain spots of the body. The treatment takes only about thirty minutes 'cause they're, maybe fifteen minutes or so, or ten minutes of radiation, and then in the three and a half years, the last time she went to the doctor, she's clear. There's not cancer there.

TI: That's amazing.

RM: So she needs to go another year and a half or so, five years or so, to be truly... but more than likely she'll die of natural causes at this point.

TI: That's just amazing how cancer --

RM: Yeah, but in my mother's case, of course, Mother's case, she came out of surgery and recovered and she went back to smoking. It killed her. It was not like she deserved it. She earned it. She really did.

TI: And in your, in your writings you describe your mother's death, and so can you tell me how she died?

RM: Of course, the cancer had spread throughout her body to the point where it not, it's not just your lungs. It's everything else that begins to, is infected and begins to deteriorate, and so it's a slow process. But eventually they had her on oxygen, so there was a tube running up her nose. And there were a number of friends that she had that would, would very faithfully come and stay with her, take turns staying with her in sort of a watch, and at the point at which she stopped, stopped talking and stopped eating and drinking it's relatively short, in fact. So I was there when my family, and they called me and they said, "Ramsay, you better come over because it's, there's a change." And what had happened is she was laboring for breath at that time. And all of a sudden the laboring stopped. Her breathing became almost normal, and the expression on her face just became very calm and eventually her breathing got slower and slower and slower and finally stopped. And then the only thing I could see that indicated any life in her body was that the artery on the side of her neck was pulsing. And I could see it pulsing and that remained for quite a while. I can't tell you exactly how many seconds, but especially when you're watching somebody die, why, time is not something you're aware of, and that finally slowed and stopped, and I knew she was gone. And at that point I think I probably stood there for a few seconds and it was, I felt like a wave coming through me, and I think, at that point I went outside onto the veranda outside this care home and I, the thing I remember is I looked up at the sky and I could see all the stars. It was clear. And then the emotions just completely took me and I cried. You could, you could even see some emotion now, when I'm talking about it. Same thing happened with the other interview.

TI: And talking about that emotion, what was the emotion? What was it coming from? Was it grief? Was it, describe what, what that emotion came from.

RM: Relief. Relief, I think, is the thing that I've got to say. It wasn't that I was gonna miss her. It wasn't that I loved her and had lost her. It was relief that the conflict was over. That's the only thing I can, I can attribute it to.

TI: And so how many years ago did this happen now? Was this...

RM: I'm trying to remember when she died now and I can't even remember.

TI: It's been, it's been a while now, hasn't it? It's been --

RM: Yes, it's been a while.

TI: And so looking back now, what have you learned from this? I mean, what...

RM: I don't know if there's any lesson to this other than to say that war's not, not just something about shootin' each other. There's a lot more to it than that. It affects people in so many different ways, and I think that's, that's probably a reason why I should tell this story. And it probably is, as a matter of fact, dehumanizing in a lot of ways. That's what happened to us. Now, if my mother had succeeded in making a doctor out of me and then taking me back to Japan there's no telling what I would've felt about now. But that's what happened to me. Yeah.

TI: Perfect. That's good. Thank you. So Ramsay, thank you very much for the interview.

RM: I'm actually pleased that I can do it. I'm pleased that I can talk about it and I'm pleased that I write, wrote about it. And I'm pleased that, that you folks are interested in what I wrote.

TI: Well, thank you. I mean, I appreciate it.

RM: Thank you.

<End Segment 28> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.