This week's Sunday Long Read has The Believer's Joshua Hunt take us on a trip to Japan's Osorezan -- Mount Fear -- as he deals with the death of his uncle among the surreal landscape of the ancient temples, trails, and travails.
In January 2023, while waiting to board a plane in Stockholm, I saw how swiftly grief can take hold of a person. In a quiet corner of Arlanda Airport, it unfolded before me like a scene from a movie: an older woman answered her cell phone, listened for a few moments to the voice on the other end, then burst into tears. Her anguish was so immediate, and so visceral, that it could only have been the worst kind of news—the end of a marriage, a dream, or a life. Not just any life, though: one so precious to her that its end was immediately comprehensible.
It was this immediacy that struck me as cinematic, because in real life, or at least in my life, death is many other things before it is something I can cry about. Last year, when my uncle Bill died of a heart attack at age fifty-seven, months passed before I could even conceive of his absence. He meant more to me than any other man, including my father, and yet his death was not at once fathomable to me. It landed with no impact I could make sense of; robbed of the clarifying weight of tragedy, I experienced his death first as an inconvenience. An obstacle. A disturbance that immediately complicated my life, or at least my career, which is what I had instead of a life. The instincts that had helped lift me out of poverty had also made it hard to slow down, and so I lived as if on the run. Next stop: Tokyo, where I planned to cement my relationship with a big American magazine by writing the definitive profile of a major Japanese novelist.
These plans started taking shape in May 2022, when the lease on my apartment in Brooklyn, New York, was coming to an end. The rent was going up so much that renewing it seemed like a gamble I wasn’t likely to collect on. Instead, I decided to do the responsible thing: put my stuff in storage, fly to Tokyo, and spend three months living in a modestly priced hotel while I wrote the story. I’d lived in Japan before, and going back after two years away seemed like the best shot I had at shaking off my malaise. It was also my best shot at producing a story that might take my writing career to the next level—a level that would put me in a position to take the occasional rent increase in stride.
By the end of the first week in June, I’d made it only as far as Manhattan, where a friend had invited me to house-sit while his family was on vacation. I was in their downtown apartment when I got the phone call about my uncle Bill. In bed but not yet asleep, I picked up the second of two late-night phone calls from my mom. Crying, and almost certainly a bit drunk, she told me that her little brother was gone, and all I could say was “Oh no.” When our call ended, a little after midnight, I couldn’t sleep, so I listened to old voicemail messages from my uncle. The most recent one was dated December 25, 2021: “Merry Christmas, Josh. I love you. It’s Uncle Bill. Hope you’re having a wonderful day. Talk to you later. Bye.”
I was meant to visit him three weeks after he left that message, but on the morning of my flight to Juneau, Alaska, I tested positive for COVID-19. I’d contracted the virus while working on a story in New Mexico—my first profile for the magazine I hoped to impress by flying halfway around the world to interview a novelist. While listening to old messages from my uncle, I dwelled bitterly on two unfulfilled promises I had made when calling to say I couldn’t make it home in January: the first was that I would get to Alaska and see him again soon; the second was that he was going to love the profile I had been working on in New Mexico. It ended up being published ten days after he died.
With my flight to Japan booked, and my nonrefundable accommodations paid for in advance, I had a narrow window for making it to the potlatch that would serve as my uncle Bill’s memorial. In Tlingit culture—our culture—the memorial potlatch has traditionally served as both a funerary ritual and a proto-capitalist one; for centuries, our departed were sent on their way with singing, dancing, food, and an ostentatious display of the wealth they would leave behind for others. These days, the banquets tend to resemble any other family cookout, and not many of our people have much wealth to leave behind. A few years ago, I met a man who put off his dad’s potlatch long enough for the carving of a large memorial totem, which struck me as the height of Tlingit opulence. My uncle Bill had left nothing behind, though, because he’d had so little, and because he had shared what little he had so freely. His potlatch proceeded as soon as a small wooden box with an image of an orca was carved to receive his ashes. By that time, though, my window of opportunity for attending had closed.
My mom sent me an announcement for the memorial service, which I perused on my phone during a layover on my way to Tokyo. In a quiet corner of Los Angeles International Airport, a dull pain grew sharper as I stared at the photograph they had chosen. It shows my uncle Bill standing on a beach on the outskirts of Juneau, bathed in sunlight passing through the sieve of an overcast sky. It is October 28, 2021, and in a few hours he will drive me to the airport for the last time. First we drive back to town, though, and along the way a double rainbow appears in the distance. He slows the pickup truck, then eases it over to the side of the road. He makes a dumb joke and asks me to take a picture of the two rainbows. When I send it to him later, I include another photo I took just a bit earlier. In it he is standing on the beach, dressed in jeans and a Carhartt shirt, smiling like he can already see the rainbows waiting just up the road.
It's a good story.
And tell the people whom you love that you do love them. Eventually you won't have that chance anymore.
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