Densho Digital Archive - Toru Sakahara - Kiyo Sakahara Interview II (denshovh-storu

<Begin Segment 44>

DG: Let's move on to talking about taking care of your parents.

KS: Oh yes. My (mother, after my father's death in 1935,) until she went to camp, I really didn't take care of her at all. I was in no position to take care of her. I was in school, but when she left camp about in 1943, I was living in Salt Lake and she came to stay with me for a while. She lived with my sister for a while. She got a job in a little town called Gunnison as a, I think she was caretaker. This woman had a motel or something and she, I think she cleaned the rooms and made beds and things like that. I think at that time my mother was in her sixties and she, maybe she wasn't quite sixty. Well she was in her sixties. But she had a lot of energy and she worked and then for the next about ten years she kind of off and on lived first with me, and then with my sister, and then with my other sisters, and then she lived with a brother of mine in Milwaukee for oh, a year or two and then a sister who lived in Chicago. She just moved from place to place and whenever she got tired of wherever she was, she came back.

DG: In the meantime, Toru was mentioning that you had all kinds of family members with, around you, too, living with you.

KS: Oh yes. Well, that was just my mother. But I've had my younger sister, Toru's younger sister, his younger brother. Many of them who were sort of either in between jobs or still had to finish school or were on their way to school. I had two nieces that stayed with me. One, Toru's sister's daughter, my brother's daughter. It seems like for at least twenty years of our marriage, we had somebody living with us all of the time. We also had a grand niece of mine from Japan live with us for about two years while she went to Roosevelt. And since then, some of my other grand nieces have come to visit and stay with us. So somehow or other, I think our house from the time we've been married has been sort of Grand Central Station. I've really enjoyed having family and...

DG: And in the last years you took care of your mother-in-law?

KS: Yes, my mother in law came to live with us for... she, when she was just about to turn eighty, she had been widowed for about five, four or five years, and she was living in a little house in Fife and we kept telling her well, you really should, you know, move in with one of us and she was very reluctant to leave her little house. But I think when she was facing eighty...

DG: It is traditional to go to the oldest son's house?

KS: Yes, I think so. Anyway.

TS: Well she had a burglary.

KS: Yeah, well, that was after she moved out of her house, Toru.

TS: Oh, that's right.

KS: I think it was that she, she was diabetic and she didn't know it. And when you live alone, you don't eat properly and she liked these manjuu things and sometimes that's all she'd have for dinner instead of eating a regular meal. Well, of course I didn't know this because I didn't live with her. I'd just call her and ask her how she is and all that. And she, it was after... we were at a, we were at a banquet and one of Toru's brother's friends said that, "Hey, there's a telephone call and you'd better go and get it." And it was his sister in Portland who had called his, called mother and she sounded kind of like she was only half there and she got distressed and decided to get a hold of Toru and Hippo at this banquet that we were at and so we left the banquet and immediately went out to Fife to see what was the matter with. Well, she was suffering from too much sugar and she was sort of faint and... so we brought her to the hospital. Well the hospital knew right away what was the matter with her. They, they did a sugar thing on her and so she needed medication.