Sometimes we write ... (March 11, 2011)

Sometimes we write to explain things. Sometimes we write to share knowledge. Sometimes we write because we know who we are and where we stand. Sometimes we write because we don’t.

Sometimes we write so that we can find solutions. Sometimes we write so that we can begin to understand.

Sometimes we write just to let go.

Yesterday I went to a party. It was a pizza party. I sat in a warm house with three other families and enjoyed myself. I drank beer with the other fathers that were there. I played kickball and dodge ball in the park with all of our kids. I drank coffee and ate dessert with my wife and her friends. I held a four-month old baby in my arms. It was a nice and beautiful day.

Seven years earlier, it was also a nice and beautiful day.

Much like yesterday, the sun was out. The sky was blue. The temperature was chilly, but with the warmth of the sun it was pleasant. I know, because it was a day that I’ll never forget.

On March 11, 2011, I lived in Sendai City, Japan.

At 2:46 PM, the time that the earthquake struck, I was in the middle of an English lesson. It was a private lesson, just a four-year old girl and I. At first, that day was no different than any other day. Then, suddenly the ground lurched to life and everything changed. Over the course of the next two or three hours, maybe longer, as I huddled in a parking lot with my co-workers and held the young children that I taught each week, for the purpose of keeping them warm and also for the purpose of soothing their fears, more than 15,000 people lost their lives.

I didn’t know that at the time. I had no idea that a tsunami was sweeping across the coast about eleven kilometers from where I was standing. There was no cellular service and the power had gone out. All I knew was that a tsunami warning had been issued. As far as I know, that’s all any of us knew. I don’t think any of us standing there in that parking lot knew or imagined that a wave of that magnitude would come crashing into the shore. I don’t think anybody who lost their life in that wave imagined that something of that size was coming for them.

It seems to me that most, if not all the people who lost their lives to the sea that day thought they were taking refuge in places of safety right up until the last few minutes, when they finally saw the unimaginable on the horizon and realized that it was too late.

I’ve heard of many people who survived that day having survivor’s guilt. I’ve heard quite a few people, people like myself who were probably never really in any harm’s way and who lost very little in comparison to so many others, talk about having a kind of trauma guilt—a feeling that one has when he/she questions whether the lingering fears, concerns, and sudden emotional outpourings that he/she has even now, seven years after the event are valid. This kind of guilt comes in the form of thoughts like this:

When so many other people have had it worse than I have, am I even allowed to feel fear, loss, worry, stress, or sadness?

Do I have any right to feel the way I do?

Isnt there something else, possibly something more that I could have done?

Yesterday, as I ate pizza in the city where I now live, which is a three-hour drive from Sendai, and which is on the opposite coast, I watched the adults around me talking in a carefree manner. None of them were near the tsunami on that day. None of them were affected by the earthquake. None of them spent days afterward waiting in lines for food and water, looking for shelter, or worse, looking for friends and family members.

The children, most of whom were born after that day, ran around wildly and freely. They were beautiful. As I watched them and listened to everyone talking, I wondered if it were even okay to be having a party on this day.

Just across the country, a mere three-hour drive away, large groups of people were mourning, saying prayers, and even searching for human remains. Yet here we were, without a care in the world, living happily.

It didn’t seem quite right. And yet it didn’t quite seem wrong either.

I don’t quite know how to process that day, or the days that followed, and the strange, sometimes confusing emotions that have been left behind inside of me. Where I live now, what I experienced on that day and the days that followed is pretty much a secret, an old scar that no one really knows about. It’s something that I don’t feel right sharing or talking about. It’s like a badge that I have but never earned.

I want to come clean and say that I don’t have any right to feel the way I sometimes do, that I don’t have any right to the guilt that I have of not having done enough during that time and of leaving Sendai too soon, that I don’t have any right to the subtle fear I sometimes have of the sea, or the plans I make in my head when driving over rivers for how to get back to my children should I ever need to. I want to say that the thoughts I have of how much water to keep and where to keep it are irrational, and that the persistent curiosity of how tall buildings actually are and how accessible their rooftops are is unnecessary. I want to come clean, as if it were something I could do, but I can’t.

Sometimes we write to lay blame.
Sometimes we write to forgive.