When our youngest daughter was 6 or 7 years old, she made a bouquet of paper flowers from scratch. I was very excited because, according to our family story, my paternal grandmother’s family started the first manufacturing business for European-style fabric flowers in Japan. They had a thriving business, and my father’s family lived next to the Yoshizumi artificial flower factory in suburban Tokyo where his mother worked as a manager.

Unfortunately I never met her because she was only in her late 40s when cancer claimed her life in the early 1940s. My father was living away to attend a high school for the elites and, according to other members of his family, was devastated by his mother’s passing. He rarely talked to me about her.

When I was young, I enjoyed watching old family photos. Most of their possessions had been lost when their home was burnt down during an American air raid in 1945, but we still had several family photos. There was a beautiful studio photo of my grandmother in kimono, probably a matchmaking photo. She did not look like me at all. But when I was in high school I noticed one of her photos with her three sons. With glasses and her hair in a ponytail, she kind of looked like me. I showed it to my father who then stared at the photo for a long time and then at me with the look I had never seen before. Finally he said, “Yes, I guess you really look like her now.”

So when my daughter made the bouquet, I sent my father this picture and titled “a flower-maker’s great granddaughter.” I thought that he might get excited and tell me something about his mother. But he did not say anything about the photo or his mother.

When my father was dying, he started saying how much he loved and missed his mother. He even called out to her occasionally.

I am not sure if he got to meet her after he passed away. He never believed in the afterlife. I did not understand this because he had actually “seen” the world after death briefly during a near death experience. His friend who had passed away was standing on the other side of a river and told him that it was not time for him to go there yet. So my father turned around and came back to life.

Well, I guess our beliefs don’t have to make sense. I believe that ancestral spirits fill the universe and are connected with me. After my father’s passing, I desperately looked for real signs but he never came to see me in the way I anticipated. I still believe that his spirit is somewhere out there, and this, even if it might be only in my heart, is comforting.

And although I never met my grandmother, seeing a piece of her in my daughter was a beautiful thing.