Anne and the Gifts Life Brings

From right to left - Melinda, Carol, Stephen, Anne and Cappy

Anne and the Gifts

The encounter began in a stark waiting room in a Japanese hospital in Tokyo. My sister, Anne Pillsbury Gripp, was occupying a room in intensive care there, having suffered a heart attack while attending an orchid show in Tokyo in 1994. Anne was the owner of the Santa Barbara Orchid Estate located in Goleta, California.

I had flown in to be with her and with her two mostly adult children, my niece Alice and nephew Perry. The next two weeks were surreal, punctuated by bewilderment and occasional humor.

Anne had always had problems with her heart, we knew that. She had suffered from Rheumatic Fever when she was two years old and it had left its print on her health; her cardiologist was optimistic but realistic. She and I had gone through the loss of the sister who was between us in age, Carol Sylvia, twenty years before. Carol had been 36 when she died of a heart attack. You don't like to think about what that might mean to you about your own heart.

Carol was just two years younger than Anne but no one would believe they were related. That was sort of amazing when both their last names were Pillsbury and they, unarguably, had the same parents. Anne was tall, skinny and dark haired with dark brown eyes. Carol was short, curvaceous, blond, and had huge, vivid blue eyes. Anne was a book worm who went on to major in math at UCLA. Carol went to secretarial school right out of high school and went on to dominate any job she took. Anne would become a mathematician for GE right out of college in 1958.

Anne and I had talked just before she took off for the airport to finalize plans to take all of the kids to Disneyland as soon as she was back, mine and hers. When the phone rang that day I picked it up expecting to hear her voice.

That waiting room was a long ways from Disneyland, no matter how you looked at it. There was too much time to think about how fragile life really is and about whether of not that still figure in the bed upstairs would wake up and see us. Twice a day we got to see her unmoving form for 45 minutes.

Carol had died the day before Valentine's Day, 1974. I was 9 months pregnant with my second child then. Later, my mother returned to me unopened the Valentine I had sent Carol. Inside were two embossed cards, one from me and one from the baby she had promised to Godmother. I still have those small cards in my desk. Every so often I take them out and hold them.

The nursing staff did not speak English but they were very firm about the time limit.

While in the waiting room we had little to look at except the other families. Some of these changed over that two weeks; some remained the same.

We could not comprehend when those who shared that small room with us spoke, although we knew it was about the people they hurried to see when the time came. We all of us went up together. Sad events brought all of us there, we understood each other. Waiting and not knowing is hard.

One day I bought a small box of candies and shared it with the lady and her little girl who were sitting cross from me. Her face lit up and she bowed, accepting the small confection. I smiled back, using the word for “you are welcome,” I had just then learned.

That started the Battle of the Gifts. I was about to learn about the Japanese custom of gifting. Giving gifts is a custom that is taken seriously in Japan. Gifts are a major line item for companies and for individuals. Gifts given at specific times of the year even have special names. A midsummer gift giving is traditional and called O-chugen. At the end of the year another gifting period blossoms with presents and is called O-seibo. Those are usually gifts given to those to whom you feel indebted.

The next day I was astonished to receive a beautifully wrapped gift handed to me by the lady who looked like a porcelain doll in western clothing. She smiled and bowed gracefully. I bobbed and accepted. Inside was a perfect pastry enclosed in cellophane. Delicious.

It was a much needed distraction at first. The gift-giving continued every day and the value and permanence slowly grew. Delicacies to be consumed turned into a small book, a set of cups, tea to be used in the tea cups. Alice and Perry began wondering aloud where it would end. So did I. Eventually, we found that out.

Talking to the English manger of the hotel where we were staying I learned that it might never stop. Frightening thought. But it was a distraction we all needed, I think.

Every night, on the way back to the moderately priced hotel, I looked for shops where I could get arm my self for the Battle of the Gifts. I enjoyed watching the shop girl wrap it. They were so fast and precise, making an art form of just handing it to me, small bow included.

Back at the hotel I would put it carefully on top of the tiny chest of drawers. Japanese hotel rooms are well appointed, but they are very small. Space at a premium the small bathroom had a bathtub that did not allow for stretching out anything. Breakfast in the morning was classical Japanese, grilled fish, Misho soup, tea and rice consumed rapidly at a counter in one of the small places we passed on the way back to the hospital. Occasionally I would hear from my children or from my husband back in Santa Barbara, but they sounded distant over the phone. They laughed over the continuing Battle of the Gifts.

Then that Battle drew to a close in a way that was very unexpected. I had been in Japan for two weeks.

None of the staff spoke English well enough to tell us what was happened. Straining to understand what the prognosis might be we had decided to put her on full life support a week after I arrived. I had immediately contacted the American Embassy to ask for translation services. They hung up on me after passing me around for an hour. That happened more times than I can remember now. Then I remembered a friend had mentioned the American Express would provide some services to gold card members and called them.

Within a day they had arranged for a specialist who spoke English and Japanese to talk to the physician overseeing Anne's case and communicate with Sue, my brother Cappy's wife back at Stanford Medical Center. Sue is a physician specializing in Oncology and Radiology.

Sue's tones were professional and sad at the same time. Anne had suffered a heart attack. If this had happened out on the street with friends present in the United States the emergency personnel called would have suspected a possible heart attack. In Japan heart attacks are far rarer. Anne had suffered irreparable brain damage. Her body was there, she was gone.

Alice, Perry and I needed to talk.

Sitting on the beds in their small room we cried together. We all knew what Anne would have wanted, there were no doubts.

I flew home alone. Alice and Perry stayed to arrange to have Anne medivaced back to the U. S. so she could be disconnected and die, as she always said she would want to do under these circumstances, at home in her own bed.

I still miss Anne. We took turns reading her favorite books to her and she was never alone. Dawn, my second oldest daughter, was reading her Pride and Prejudice when Alice said that Anne had stopped breathing.

When I was getting ready for the memorial service I discovered how many people remembered the pumpkin pies Anne baked for everyone every Thanksgiving I remembered the many garments and other items she had made for her family from a huge bolt of bold red and white stripped material that felt like it was made of canvas. I got a skirt and blouse; I was five then, that was scratchy where it touched the skin. I also received a jacks bag that lasted better than leather.

All the men in the family got short sleeved shirts that made us look like escapees or a singing group. It was so Anne, we used to say. Anne loved giving gifts. I thought about that during those hours in the waiting room, thought about the gifts, small and large we had exchanged over the years and what gifts mean.

In Japan gifts are very conscious parts of life. After those weeks in that stark, small, waiting room with the ugly linoleum floor and those hard chairs giving and receiving looked different to me. They mean more and now they are more than objects. Gifts are many things. Anne's death and the Battle of the Gifts taught me many things. Some of the gifts life brings, the least visible, connect us across time; the greatest gift, love, connects us us past death, and that I find as I grow older and hopefully wiser, is the most precious thing we ever receive.

James Dean: A Recipe and a Memory

A Recipe and Insight from the life of James Dean.

The Eclectic Sandwich Delight

(Ingredients vary depending on what is available)

Peanut Butter

Strawberry Jam

2 slices of bread

onion so thinly sliced you can see through it.

Tomato “ditto”

Lettuce “ditto”

One of the big, fat dill pickles also sliced very, very thin

Potato chips, crushed to the tiniest possible shreds

Ketchup for dipping mostly

Lightly toast the bread so there is no brown but it is just a little crisp. Slather on the peanut butter on one piece and the Strawberry Jam on the other. Layer on the onion and tomato so that the whole surface of the peanut butter is covered only once with each. Then sprinkle with the well crushed potato chips and cover with the very, very thin slices of pickle, and just enough pickle so that the surface is barely covered. Sprinkle lettuce with a touch of Ketchup on top and cover with the other slice of bread.

Jimmy cut his on the diagonal. I liked that. Served with lemonade and a small glass of milk.

I saw this sandwich prepared and assembled and then consumed by James Dean in the early 1950s. I was struck at how precise he was and how thin the tomato and onion were sliced. Jimmy and I both wore glasses nearly all the time so I tended to lean in close to watch and nearly got my nose trimmed. I was very young at the time.

Jimmy had dropped by at lunch time for a chat and most probably for a bite to eat. He was very skinny and Mom was sure he needed a meal. His Mom and my Mom had known each other before Jimmy's Mom died. Jimmy ate lunch sitting at my small table with me in the kitchen. Mom had already eaten, actually. Jimmy showed me how to peel up the top of my sandwich (Beanie, with just peanut butter and the jam) and sprinkle on the crushed potato chips. I loved it. Then he let me have a bite of his; interesting taste.

Jimmy had unusual tastes in food but when he assembled things it worked even when you thought it wouldn't.

(From my book, What Jimmy Taught me about Growing Up.)

After lunch we went into the back yard.

Mom was showing her roses to Jimmy, pointing out the colors and other details like aphids. The War of the Aphids was a theme that brought on updates at various times to all of us. I wandered off. I was not much interested in roses. I had been pushed into a small grove of them some months earlier and had not forgotten the experience of being a pin cushion.

I went off to play under the Avocado Tree while they talked. That was my favorite destination in the back yard for making mud pies. The Tree murmured, making comforting, familiar sounds as its leaves danced and wavered in the wind. Being under the Tree made me feel like there was a tent over head and under the Tree it was always cool.

For some reason the mud there was especially fine grained and therefore looked like chocolate. Didn't taste like chocolate though. I had already ascertained that on a previous occasion. As I made up hamburger patties of mud, folding these into other shapes suddenly an idea struck me.

I had something I wanted to show Jimmy. I knew he would like to see it; he would appreciate it as no one else would. They were just walking back into the house when I grabbed Jimmy's hand. I told him he had to come look at something – right now. My mother smiled and went in the house. Stevie had started to cry, I could hear him.

A tingle of excitement runs through me even now when I remember dragging Jimmy by the hand over the concrete pathway along the side of the garage. My arm was up at an angle because he was so much taller than me. I looked ahead to the rather dense and tall bush against the back fence. On one brief occasion I was off the ground because I was pulling so hard. Jimmy was going to be impressed, I just knew it.

I rounded the tall bush and pointed, triumphantly. The bush leaned slightly outward, creating a small alcove behind it. There was just a foot or so of space and there was my prize. I had been visiting it for weeks. I don't know how it got there. It certainly had not been ours. The dead Tortoise had been past all hope when I first found it there spread eagled on its back. I had been watching it being eaten by ants for these many weeks, never mentioning it to anyone. I tried to look every few days, although I knew that I should not tell Mom. She would remove it, I was pretty sure.

Jimmy looked at the Tortoise for a long time, just standing there. Then he squatted down to get a better look, pushing the bush aside. He looked at me and smiled, his eyes crinkling up at the corners, as I stood there waiting for his reaction. I have lived a long life but I have never again been so right about someone who was still nearly a stranger. Jimmy was delighted; he nodded. We understood each other.

Then Jimmy told me that he had watched the same process himself back in Fairmount only it was with a whole cow.

I shuddered. Cows were huge and without shells you could see much more. Jimmy was the first person with whom I discussed the physical process of mortality. Normally, when things like gold fish died they were immediately buried, usually in the toilet after a brief prayer. That did not allow me to check back and see how things were going.

I had yet to persuade my parents to let me bury a deceased goldfish in a Band aid box to be dug up later for minute examination. The tortoise came first. Jimmy filled me in on various aspects of the process with horrid expressions of face and gestures of hands as he made rubbery faces that made me laugh.

We had a cat then, Tiger Lady, later Tiger when his gender was correctly identified. Tiger was still a fluffy kittenish presence then. Mortality was an issue still past my horizon for anything but goldfish and the tortoise. I was curious about the physical process of death, but Jimmy did not leave it there. With Jimmy answers led inevitably to more questions.

Jimmy told me right then and there that the essence of the Tortoise was gone. Its form remained but the thing that had built it out of the raw materials of the Earth, just like we were built, had left its body and moved on.

With just a few words Jimmy had given me more things to think about. From the process of the deterioration of the physical body we had arrived at the question of the force that created and moves the body while it lives and the destination of that essence after death.

Those questions were revelations in themselves.

How were we built out of the Earth I wondered, looking down at the dirt? I put that thought away for another time. Now I wanted to know where the Tortoise had gone, if anyplace. I asked Jimmy. He paused, cocked his head to one side and looked right at me. He told me he did not know, exactly; he wondered himself if it was a place we could really understand while we were still in our bodies. Perhaps we would have to wait to know. He told me that if he found out he would tell me. He nodded as he said this. Jimmy did not mind admitting the limits of his knowledge.

The death and aftermath of the life of Tortoise opened up a series of conversations about the nature of the world to me that filled several of Jimmy's visits and spilled over into conversations with my father, too.

Death, Jimmy told me, was not the end of the life of a Tortoise any more than it was the end of our own lives when death came. The essence that made us what we are continued. When he told me this he pointed out that I could not see the wind, only the things the wind carries. I was only aware of the light when it was gone. But all of these things were far more tangible than the essence that created and moved the Tortoise. All continued; Death was transition and illusion.

I already accepted that Jimmy would not lie to me; that was part of the trust that came with his reaction to the Tortoise. But I had learned that people would tell me things that were not strictly factual and often thought this was funny. Jimmy didn't do that. Jimmy told me the truth as he saw it about everything that came up. Then he told me to think it out for myself and never, never accept what others say as the truth until I had done that.

That was the first lessons that Jimmy taught me. Death is not the end; the essence continues; question what you think is true; trust yourself. These were lessons I would carry with me always.