There is a questionable story that came out of the emotional rubble of the Japanese Tsunami of 2011. As the story goes, a young mother realized that she could not escape her home as the five-minute monster 9.0 quake shook her home to its very foundation. In desperation to save her three-month old son, she got down on all fours and placed the baby underneath her to protect him as her home collapsed on her body. Somehow she also managed to text him a message.
The story goes on to describe how rescuers found her body in the rubble, realized that she had perished and then quickly moved on to search other areas. However, the lead rescuer hesitated for some reason and had a nagging feeling that he should return to that particular house because this woman had been found in a rather odd body position. The others were in a hurry, but he urged them to return. As they pushed her lifeless form aside, there was her three-month old son sleeping safely underneath her. They quickly cleared the area to extricate him. It was at this time that they also found her cell phone and the message she had supposedly texted to him: if you survive this, remember that I love you.
As this story circulated throughout the internet, it was hard to read this account of love’s ultimate sacrifice without weeping. True or not, the sheer poignancy of this story moved many of us to almost instant tears. I admit it: I cried. Then I asked myself why I cried so readily. I pondered this throughout that day and the next. I shared the story with my husband and he instantly teared up [but then he has always been rather sentimental.] So I continued to ask myself what it was about this story that so moved me. Even after I discovered that the story might not be entirely true, I still found myself pondering my own reaction to it.
The answer that came to me repeatedly was quite simple really. It was the story’s elegant simplicity that so brightly stands out. There was a karmic nobility to this young mother’s actions. With each increasingly violent shaking, she had to know that she was dying, that her house would collapse around her, and yet she thought to try to save her son. In the face of the greatest challenge to her own survival, she set aside her own feelings, her sheer panic and thought of her son.
All of us want to know that our own mother loves us so much that she would sacrifice her life for us – willingly. The child in this story may have to grow up without her, but he will always know to the depth of his core, that she profoundly loved him.
But there is more to this [if it is true and I do not know if it is true], and that is why the rescuer returned to that house once he had determined that she had died. There was no logical reason for him to go back. Yet, he had a ‘nagging feeling’. What was that? Where did it come from? Was that feeling the mother, now a ghost, still watching over her son, even in death? Did she watch in horror as her son’s salvation moved away from her home? Was that ‘nagging feeling’ really the ghost mother screaming at the lead rescuer to return to the house? Could that be?
Perhaps my own tears were for that part of the story. Even in death, her loyalty, dedication and persistence prevailed. Literally, she was screaming at this man to save her son – and he did save the child. Perhaps only then could she find peace. Death does not stop the feelings of love that we carry within our souls for those we love. Nothing can change or alter those feelings. Life and death are only dimensions of reality: they do not define the limits of love.
This mom did not have the karma to have a whole life with her son this lifetime. However what she did have and what she did display were the finest elements of karmic nobility, the most golden elements of love that one human being, one immortal soul can have for another.
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