The COVID Chronicles #75: A 10-year Anniversary...

Thursday was March 11th. March 11th is a milestone day in our lives because that was the day of the Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami. This event has been a milestone event in our marriage because it was so traumatic for both Wife and I, though more traumatic for Wife. We often talk about our experiences around that time. We both experienced it differently with her experience being significantly more traumatic than mine. Here is something I wrote about that day (and the days following it) on another social media site: 

March 11, 2011. It was also a Thursday.

I was staying a Hampton Inn in Philadelphia for a higher education job-searching event and professional conference. I would end up being there for 9 days. This was Day 2. I woke up in my hotel room in Philadelphia and prepared for my interviews that morning at the NASPA Placement Exchange. They were with Western Washington and University of Illinois-Carbondale.

I turned on the TV to watch the news hoping to get a weather report while I got ready for the day and was greeted by the horrific images of a massive earthquake & tsunami that had struck the Tohoku region of Japan. My first impulse was to call Wife because that was the day she was scheduled to leave Tokyo on the bullet train and head three hours north to her home province of Iwate, but the phone lines were so crossed I couldn't get through to her on her new global Droid 2 smartphone. I showered and dressed in a hurry. It was not until I reached the convention center and used their wifi to access Facebook that I learned she was okay. She had not left Tokyo as planned, but there was no information on her family's well-being. Her family lived in an eastern coastal city that was surely hit and their home was near the port. There would be no news for nearly a week.

I did my scheduled interviews that morning, but rescheduled a phone interview, scheduled for the afternoon with Ripon College, for later in the week. At the beginning of each interview I explained that I was keeping my cell phone on during the interview due to a family emergency/crisis that was unfolding in Japan. I had already called my parents in Arizona and told them to call me if they heard from Wife. Two of the interviewers for WWU who I later saw after the conference's keynote address expressed their admiration to me on keeping it together during the interview.

The rest of my TPE experience is a blur. The same goes for the conference days. Each day after my interviews or conference sessions were over, I would walk back to my hotel room with a take-out meal for dinner, lay on my bed, eat my food, and watch the news, all while curled up in the fetal position with my head propped and resting on a pillow as I laid sideways on the king-sized bed. I was emotionally exhausted at the end of each day and did not want to interact with people. Occasionally, I would call or be called by friends with whom I had worked in that region of Japan. All of us were in shock and disbelief, but talking with them provided a certain amount of needed comfort.

On the last night of the conference, I was invited to meet up with acquaintances and peers from NAU at one of the conference hotel bars, but my heart and mind were not interested in socializing nor was I particularly interested in hearing about other peoples job searches which I perceived to be going better than mine. Instead, I sat down on a padded bench in the bar area away from other people, put my face and head in my hands, and began to weep, unable to control my emotions any longer. A stranger came up next to me and said, "you look like you need to talk to someone." All I could do was nod my head. Acknowledging we did not know each other, he asked, "would you like to talk with me?" All I could do was shake my head no, but I was thankful that someone noticed my pain and my distress.

I walked out of the bar and back my hotel, grabbing dinner at a take-out Chili's. While I was walking, a friend I knew from my time in Japan called me to say that my wife had posted that her father had finally called her to tell they were all safe, which was relief. After getting my food, I walked back to my room to eat it. All I wanted to do was get home to Arizona and plan my next move.

Wife, who was in Japan, was originally scheduled to stay only a month and she had been there only a few days. Instead of returning home as planned in early April, Wife clandestinely traveled with her two male cousins in a borrowed van packed with donated supplies for the people of Kamaishi. Wife did not travel back to Tokyo with her cousins. Instead, she stayed in Kamaishi with her family until June and helped her father organize donations and visit and distribute donated supplies to the numerous evacuation shelters located in school gyms around the region. They often visited handicapped people known by her father because they were largely ignored by other relief efforts. I did not see her again until late June. 

Wife has often talked the trauma and the shock of seeing the appalling destruction of the area and the unnerving darkness, quiet & stillness, and smell of death of the area. She has also shared with me the emotional people she would encounter at the shelters who would grab onto her asking & begging if she had seen or heard of their family member at another shelter. Wife and to an extent her family have shared with me a feeling of survivor's guilt. Their home was undamaged and they lost no family members. 

I have since visited the Tohoku region twice since the disaster. Rebuilding efforts are still on-going and survivors have done their best to maintain their pre-tsunami communities, but there will be an emotional scar of grief that will last for several generations. This became most evident to me when we stayed the night at small "ryokan" during my most recent visit. The ryokan was owned and run by an elderly couple and it had been rebuilt and used as a community gathering place after the tsunami. Upon entering the front door I was greeted by small memorial shrine to the adult daughter of the owners who perished in the waves. She had a husband and a daughter who both survived. It was then that I realized how long and deep the grief will last, not only for this family, but for all families who lost family members.

I think it will be the same for this COVID-19 pandemic. The grief over the loss of so many family members will last for generations. As is stated in a favorite Civil War documentary of mine, "people were filled with memories of men who should have still been living, but weren't." 

That is all I have for this morning....