The Bamboo Forest

Half a century after meeting her, I can still trace the origins of everything I now understand about the terrifying mysteries—time’s gravity, quantum mechanics, the intrinsic agency of matter, the proximity of life to death—to my late mother-in-law, Janet Christensen Wyman. Eighteen years ago today, I discovered in the final moments of her life that we do not enter alone the crossroads of this middle distance between heaven and heaven.

Janet had fallen ill. Caught by cosmic surprise, her body was rushed along the slow road from Ku’ilima, whose Hawaiian name means ‘holding hands with the land,’ to the regional medical center at Kāneʻohe, where her independent spirit would momentarily, and then all together, let the land slip away. As Kari sat vigil in Kāneʻohe, named for an ancient Hawaiian princess who ran away into a deadly bamboo forest to find true love, I knelt alone back home from whose point of vantage I was gifted a window into a chat between Janet and Eternity.  

Sitting upright in bed, she was conversing with five people familiar to her but invisible to Kari. Kari’s grandfather stood at the foot of the bed. The others, unfamiliar to me, bore silent witness as Grandpa Christensen counseled with his youngest daughter. I say ‘silent,’ but I could hear no words, nor, in hindsight, do I recall the movement of a single set of lips. I say ‘counseled’ because, in spite of my deafness, I felt certain by means I cannot explain that the council convened in Janet’s greenroom was deliberating what Camus called ‘the one truly serious philosophical problem’—whether to stay or go. Hours later, on February 6, 2007, Kari phoned to tell me her mother had chosen to walk the bamboo forest.  

We are truly such stuff as dreams are made. But not our dreams alone. As Janet taught me, first in word and ultimately indeed, this little life is rounded by far more than sleep.

Author’s Note. This entry is an archive of an Instagram post at @TheHousteps on February 6, 2025.