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I was always disgusted whenever I saw the people in Nishijima’s group proudly showing off their new rakusus. It made the whole organization look like a cult. Uniforms are things you wear when you get a job at Burger King. What’s a rakusu, really, other than a fancy kind of name-tag: “Welcome to Buddhism! My name’s Brainwashed Twit!” So when people in Nishijima’s group used to say to me, “You ought to take the precepts,” I felt like I was in one of those bad horror movies where everybody’s gradually being taken over by the aliens and I am the only human being left in town—Pod People coming at me from every direction: “Join us! Join us!” It creeped me out.

ALL OF THIS STUFF with Nishijima wanting me to join his cult and become an Authority Figure within it happened to coincide with my grandfather being diagnosed with cancer. He was already eighty-one years old and the doctors felt that surgery at that age might kill him faster than the disease which seemed to be progressing extremely slowly. At one point he was sent to the hospital for observation and I decided I’d better go and visit him rather than wait until it was too late.

Plus, the visit would give me a chance to stop by Tim’s place and talk to him about this whole Dharma Transmission deal. Tim was still in Kent which was four hours’ drive from where my grandpa was, down in Cincinnati. I arranged to arrive in Cleveland, spend a few days in Kent, and then head for Cincinnati. Grandpa, my aunt and my grandmother said, was doing pretty well under the circumstances and there was no reason to hurry. When I spoke to Grandpa on the phone he sounded strong and even told me it was a waste of money to come all the way to America just to see him.

My grandmother, my aunt, and the doctors were wrong. Grandpa died suddenly just hours after I arrived in the country. I found out when the friend I’d arranged to stay with got a frantic call from my dad while I was out visiting Tim’s place. Several hours later when I finally got the message, I was devastated. After that, talking to Tim about Dharma Transmission didn’t seem so important anymore.

I LOVED MY GRANDFATHER DEARLY. He was a true friend and always supportive of whatever I did in my life. I’d worried about his reaction when I was telling him about my moving to Japan—because he’d joined the navy in World War II in order to fight those people. But he was fine with that and he was pleased when I brought home a Japanese wife for him to meet. It was tough to lose him.

Since I come from a long line of agnostics we had no family pastor to call on to perform the funeral. My grandmother ended up finding some random religious guy in the phone book. He seemed sincere enough—but he’d never met my grandfather. We talked with him briefly a couple hours before the funeral was set to begin and he asked the family members if they would say a few words at the service. My dad and I volunteered, hoping others would follow suit. But no one did. My dad made it through his bit very well, I thought. Knowing Grandpa’s love of humor I prepared a joke as part of my speech. I said that I’d come out from Japan to visit my grandpa, not to attend his funeral. In fact, I said, Grandpa had told me in our last phone conversation that if he did die soon, I was not to waste my money coming to his funeral. But, I said, since I was already in town and had nothing else to do that morning, I thought I’d drop by.

I wasn’t sure how everyone would take the joke (a funeral parlor’s a tough room to work), but I got a laugh so I guess the speech went over pretty well. Afterward my grandmother took me aside and asked, “Do you think there’s any way he could know we’re all here and we’re all thinking of him?” Without thinking about the question I surprised myself by honestly saying, “Yes. I do. Absolutely.”

I’ve often wondered where that answer came from. It was spontaneous. It wasn’t based on any particular belief I held—in fact it went against