This past month I have been helping to take care of my uncle who recently had surgery at the City of Hope for lung cancer. The operation went well, but he developed complications during his recovery, and has been hospitalized again because of an infection. His condition is improving, thankfully, and I hope to see his complete recovery in the near future. He has gone through a lot during the past month and a half since his surgery.

I would like to share with all of you some things about my uncle's life. He has endured a lot of hardships in his life that I find quite amazing.

My uncle is my mother's older brother. My mother's family lived in Hood River, Oregon, before the war. My grandfather farmed there, raising fruit in an orchard, and also working for others. My mother was one of seven children, as was common in those days.

My grandparents were struggling farmers in the depression days. My mother has told me really heart-wrenching stories about how poor they were in those days. Meals that consisted of just boiled corn for dinner, picking wild watercress, and bringing sandwiches to school every day that consisted of just two pieces of bread and a sandwich spread like mayonnaise with relish in it. No meat, no cheese, ….nothing. Just the bread and sandwich spread.

When my uncle was only a small boy, he was exploring in the barn, and found some dynamite caps. In those days farmers used dynamite themselves to blow up tree stumps to clear farmland. It was a common practice. My uncle didn't know what the dynamite cap was, and hit it with a hammer. It exploded, and he lost several fingers and also his right eye. My mother remembers how my grandparents would take him to the doctor in Portland, and how they had a hard time paying the medical bills. Throughout his life since childhood, my Uncle Ray has lived with one eye and short stumps for fingers on his one hand.

Uncle Ray has been a bachelor uncle his whole life, and was never married. From what I understand, he always thought that he would eventually go blind, so he never wanted to burden someone to have to care for him.

After the war, my mother's family moved to the Eastern Oregon area where the whole family worked on farms and in agriculture. It was there that my Uncle Ray started his own farm, like my father and his brother did, as did many Japanese in that area. I really don't know how they did it, those Nisei farmers in those days. How did they start farming from nothing? They worked on farms and saved their wages and then began to share crop the land. What they managed to make, they would then buy a tractor, then a truck, and year after year, bit by bit, they built their farms.

After retiring, my Uncle Ray has turned to gardening,

and raises some of the best yama imo and gobo that you can imagine. His other love is to hunt matsutake, and every fall, without fail, I receive a box of delicious matsutake from him……except this year.

This year he missed out on his matsutake hunting because he was diagnosed with lung cancer. This is Uncle Ray's third bout with cancer. 15 years ago he had stomach cancer and survived that. 6 or 7 years ago he had tongue cancer, and survived that.

This time it has been a real ordeal, with the complications of the infection. Through it all, he has maintained a positive attitude and has just hung in there, despite the pain and discomfort. Only once did I hear him say, "I want to go home."

One day, some x-ray technicians came to his room to bring him for a scan or x-ray of some type. They took him in his hospital bed, and I waited in his room for his return. He was very weak and tired because of his infection. He had been poked with needles and tubes for over a month. But when the technicians wheeled him back into the room, as they were leaving, he was trying to say something. I leaned over closer to him, to see what it was. I thought he was in pain or something. He whispered in a very weak voice, barely audible, "Tell them thank you." I stopped the technicians before they could leave, and I told them my uncle wanted to thank them. They seemed a little surprised by this. They came over to the bed and he waved to them thank you.

I thought about my own life. I sometimes don't bother to say thank you to someone when I am healthy, but my Uncle Ray, sick, weak, and tired, makes the effort to tell the technicians who are complete strangers, thank you.

I think there is something spiritual about that quality. Some people, despite adversity and suffering, still find something to be grateful about. Maybe my uncle sees the nurses, doctors, and technicians, as all doing their best to help cure him. Perhaps he feels that the least he can do is thank them.

When we live our life from a self-centered perspective, it is hard to be grateful, but if we live our life in which we are conscious and aware of the "other", meaning all that sustains and nurtures our life, then we cannot help but feel grateful and thankful.

The Shin Buddhist path is the life that unfolds that kind of gratitude and appreciation in a person's life, because it awakens us to see the "other" and not the "me."

Namuamidabutsu,

Rev. Marvin Harada