Page created by: Kari, Risa, Paul, and Mido

My mother was bedridden, no longer interested in food—an ominous sign for a master chef. She knew she was dying, yet she was peaceful, hopeful. She looked forward to reuniting with those who had gone before her. Holding her hand I said, “Mom, who is the first person you want to see when you get to the other side?”

A stroke and then Parkinson’s disease had withered her body and voice over the previous eighteen and a half years. She whispered, “My mother.”

Mom was eighty-four when she spoke those words. She had last seen my grandmother, the one I never knew, when she was ten years old. That was in northeast China in 1945, a few weeks before the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings ended World War II.

Having grown up an orphan and a refugee, she made it her mission to reach out to the displaced. She offered immigrants shelter in her home, work at her restaurant, USA citizenship and, when they had acquired enough experience, investment in their dreams to have their own businesses. By then they’d started families, and Mom would hire the next generation of busgirls and dishwashers, cooks and hostesses. She admonished them to save every penny for college or whatever they wanted to do next, “as long as it makes the world more beautiful.” She looked after them, and in return they called her “Mom.” Everyone did. How my mother relished being a parent, a caretaker, an advocate, a friend.

My mother did not battle Parkinson’s. She was not one to engage in conflict of any kind. She peacefully accepted that her Parkinson’s was an opportunity to rise to a challenge, to keep her body as strong as she could, but more to let her heart ring true and wide, as it did throughout her life, but more quietly now in a voice no less strong for its Parkinson’s-diminished volume. Mom lived for others. Noriko Morimoto’s life was a heartsong, written with love by a person who loved unconditionally.