Today

Is not so good, keeping track wise. Or to be more accurate, today was the same as yesterday, I barely made it to the end of the street. Lots of huffing and puffing after. I got up very weak, still groggy and a bit dizzy. This time I waited an hour, replacing the bags and pads in the bucket and then dumping my colostomy bag shit into one of them while watching another courtroom drama, this time in movie form, unfold for forty five minutes till Kate Beckinsdale was able to prove the cops tampered with witnesses and evidence to put her client behind bars. Okay, happy ending, bags set and bag empty, time to trudge downstairs. Didn’t make any difference. So I’m the same as yesterday. Oh well. I’m getting my rest, still doing the six ninety ninety thing or close enough today. I’m getting my sleep, I’m recovering, and I may never be all that strong just coming down the stairs into the humidity of the outside world. At least for a long time. Tomorrow when at the hospital will be a greater test. That is one I hope I pass, but have to be ready to signal for the wheel chair if I feel too weak. Shut it down. My wife won’t like that though. That will be the hardest part. I want to please her, so if I’m borderline, all fifty-fifty I’ll want to push through. Break it into stages I have to do. Make it easier. Making to the escalator won’t be all that hard. The question is where is the blood test area? I think we go back from the elevator so it’s not all that far? If that’s right, then it shouldn’t be too hard. Then after that, it’s all close, and maybe sitting in chairs that are more comfortable than wheel. Got to plan these things right. It worked so well in Costco.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

But first today. Can't ignore today. It is, after all, the 70^th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. I woke up around 8:00 then around 8:45, missing the moment as I always do. That’s 8:15, blue skies over Hiroshima. As they do every year they hold a commemoration in the Peace Park, even Prime Minister Abe showed up, a blue cordon of heavy security and all. Still, it looked like a dignified ceremony with the gonging of the bell, two children doing the honors. August 6^th is also the one day when Hiroshima becomes the center of Japan, many TV stations parking their news desks in the Peace Park with a view of the Atomic Bomb Dome across the river. At night they lit the lantern boats and floated them on that river. It’s beautiful, heart breaking to look at. The stories are heartbreaking. Right now on NHK translated news, they are having a story on the Peace Park’s Small Mound, which houses 70,000 unidentified remains. Many people come to pray here, in hopes this is where their lost loved ones are interred. There's this one woman, 95 now, who has been trying to return any of the remains home. Some have names, but they are tentative, and as research further shows, many are wrong. She talked about trying to find her mother herself on that day, but everybody was burned beyond recognition. She thought she might recognize her mother’s voice so she stomped on the people lying there in hopes she heard her mother’s scream. Of course she didn’t find her mother and now apologizes every day to the people she hurt. It does sound like a thing a child would do though, it’s this great little childlike moment, either amid horror or turned grotesque by it. Either way, not something easy to contemplate. She also brought up a salient point too when she said she believes the spirits are suffering, dwell in sadness still. I think that is something primal in Japanese culture, where many families, or at least still some, have butsudons, shrines where they keep the remains of their loved ones, at least for awhile, I don’t know the precise custom. Except I know how important it is for a family to have the remains of the people they have lost. We have the remains of our cat, Oneechan here, as I wrote before, with a bowl of water and food laid before them. It helped us deal with our grief and still does. I know it doesn't compare, but it is the closest I come to understanding the incomprehensible. To have such a gap like that, your parents and grandparents and all your loved ones turned 70,000 gaps. 

Just another story among the hundreds of thousands that originated from the ground zero of that awful day.