Patty felt her obligation was to take care of her parents, John and Masako, when they got into their 90s and couldn’t take 100% care of themselves. As a retired nurse, she felt she was the best one to take it on.
She had no idea how much her father would resist her.
He was a small but hearty Japanese American man. Well into his 80s, his face was unwrinkled, his hair black.
He was smart, energetic, ambitious, dreamed of becoming a nuclear physicist. But during World War Two, like all Japanese and Japanese Americans in the U.S., he, his parents and grandparents, were put into concentration camps. They lost their farm, most of what they owned, and their dreams. Shortly after they opened the camp gates, he and Masako married and eventually moved to the San Francisco suburbs where he started a gardening business. He always clarified that it was not landscaping. It was gardening: mowing lawns, pruning trees, planting flowers. He made enough to raise his five kids, pay for their college educations and, later in life, travel around the world.
Well into his 90s, he worked seven days a week in that gardening business. Seeing how hunched over he was getting and how slowly he was moving, Patty found a list of his customers and called each one to ask, “How do you feel about my father working for you?”
One said, “I’m afraid he’s going to die on my lawn.”
Soon he had no customers. But he didn’t seem to blame her.
One day, she pulled into his driveway and noticed that his car looked cleaner. She asked him, “Did you go to the car wash?”
It took a while to get the straight answer. His driving skills were not great and the day before, he had rolled his car over and totaled it. He immediately went to the Toyota dealership and – hoping no one would notice – bought the same model, year and color!
When Patty took away his car keys, he was using a walker. Furiously, he left the walker behind, hurried to the tool shed, grabbed a shovel and chased her, threatening to beat her with it. She leapt into her car, he caught up with her and slammed the car with the shovel. The safest thing she could do was drive away and come back another day.
This final stage of his life, things did not go his way.