Recently, I was telling my children about some of the people I have lost throughout my life. After listening to my stories, they commented that I seem to have come across a lot of death, especially when I was young. I had never really thought about it that way before, but perhaps they are right.
One of my earliest memories of death comes from my childhood. A boy at my age from childcare, about seven or eight years old, was playing ball with some friends. The ball went into a well, and one of the children asked him to retrieve it. He tried to get the ball and fell into the well. He died there.
What I remember most vividly is the sound of the ambulance sirens. I can still hear them in my memory from the kitchen of the house where I lived at the time.
A few years later, when I was in Grade 2, there was a girl at my primary school who had no hair. That was the first time I heard the word leukemia. She passed away when we were in Grade 3. At that age, I did not fully understand what cancer was, but I understood that someone I knew was no longer coming back.
I was a baby when this happened, tragedy touched my family. One of my young cousins was crossing a road with her siblings while they were being looked after by someone else. The person responsible did not check properly before crossing, and my cousin was struck by a car and killed.
What stayed with me most was seeing the impact it had on my aunt. She fell into a deep depression after losing her daughter. For many years afterwards, she found it difficult to speak to me or my siblings, cousins because we reminded her of the child she had lost. As a child, I did not fully understand her reaction. Looking back now as a parent, I can only imagine how overwhelming that grief must have been. Her loss stayed with her for many years.
When I was in Grade 5, another tragedy struck close to home. Two sisters who often played dodgeball with us at school died in a sand tunnel collapse at a local beach. They had dug a tunnel and crawled inside, and the sand gave way above them. It was a heartbreaking loss for our community.
That same year, on 19 August, my mother side grandfather passed away. I remember the date because it was memorable, commuted to his hospital with my mother till his death. As I grew older and moved to Australia, I faced other kinds of loss. My remaining grandparents passed away while I was in Brisbane. I could not afford to travel back to Japan for their funerals, so I missed the opportunity to say goodbye in person. That is something I still feel sad about.
The deaths did not stop with childhood. Over the years, several people from my school days have passed away from cancer or accidents. A few years ago, my cousin and uncle died of cancer around the same time. More recently, the sister of a close university friend passed away from cancer, leaving behind two young children. She had been a percussionist during her school years, and it was difficult to hear of her passing.
Looking back, death has been a quiet companion throughout my life. Not constantly present, but present often enough to remind me that life is fragile. What has stayed with me is not only the deaths themselves, but also the grief left behind. I have seen how the loss of a child can affect a parent for decades, how illness can take people long before anyone is ready, and how accidents can change families forever in a single moment.
Perhaps because of these experiences, I think about mortality differently from many people. Death is not something that belongs only to old age. It can arrive unexpectedly, at any stage of life, and often without warning. Rather than making me fearful, this awareness has made me grateful. I often find myself thinking about the people who wanted to keep living but never had the chance. Simply being alive today feels like something I should not take for granted.
It was this perspective that led to a conversation with my children recently. After hearing these stories, my son became upset and said, “If you died, I would die too.”
I knew he did not mean it literally. He was expressing the fear that many children feel when they cannot imagine life without the people they love most. Hearing those words made me think about all the parents, children, grandparents, cousins and friends whose lives had intersected with mine, and how every loss had left its mark.
So I made him a promise.
I told him I would live until I was 95.
Of course, none of us can make that promise with certainty. But it seemed to comfort him. I told him that by then he would be old enough to have built a life of his own, perhaps with a beloved partner and family around him, and he would not feel so alone.
Life keeps moving forward like this. People come into our lives, and eventually they leave. We carry their memories with us, and then continue on our own path for a while longer.
Perhaps that is why I try to appreciate ordinary days. Every morning we wake up is something of a gift. Not everyone gets as many tomorrows as they hoped for.
As I reflect on all these memories, there is one person I have not written about here. His name was Yusuke. He was someone who inspired me deeply while he was alive, and his influence on me remains long after his passing. His story deserves more than a few sentences in a longer reflection like this.
Perhaps that is a story for my next blog post.
For now, I am simply grateful to still be here.
Nozomi Omote 
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