In Memoriam

Leslie Mamoru Fugikawa
1944–2026

A eulogy for my father, Leslie Mamoru Fugikawa. Eulogy, a “good word” and yet also a “good reason” or “good lesson” from a life thus far lived. A mere four minutes to expound upon a life of four score and one years composed of unforgiving minutes filled with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.

Leslie Mamoru, as his name forbore, was long the protector, the strength of House Fugikawa. As his parents Tamotsu and Toshiko poured out themselves to form its foundation, my father stood as the great load bearing beam of the first story of a storied house not yet fully framed. To know truly my father, to understand what stood beyond the stern and sometimes stoic exterior, to grasp the honor by which he led his life, you must consider the onus honoris, the weight of the burden he bore.

Consider the weight of the trunk into which all the worldly wealth of Fugikawa’s fit as it was lifted onto the train to be taken to the camp, how the family hope of the post-depression, post-world war rested on the back of a boy hoisting potatoes at his father’s fruit market.

Consider the weight of standing up to be counted for your country during a war no one wanted looking like the man who caused your bunkmate to grow up without a father.

Consider now the weight of an interracial marriage in the 1960s, one that would well outlast the bigotry of that age.

Consider the weight of a decade of infertility, of pledging, twice, your heart, your home, and your name to a child not yours but therein irrevocably so, of raising three children in age fewer than that count of years, of losing your employ when they were all in private high schools, of seeing them all married in a year and a decade or two thence walk with them through the scourge and solitude of divorce.

Know you then something of the weight on this man, this protector and his strength, and yet his last burden, the cross of his latter years is the lesson of his life for him and us here today. My father had to surrender his strength, not at once but in parts: first his limbs and mobility, then his kidneys, his heart, his bowels, his freedom from pain, his clarity of mind, and at last his breath in the arms of that boy, now man, he called to be his son.

The world will see, if ever it cares to look, a life of vibrant energy held for a time and lost simply to the entropy of the universe, but I believe my father came to understand in the meditative hum of the dialysis machine amid these surrenders that his strength was never properly his. He was forced to recognize as damned nonsense the idea that God will never give you problems greater than you can handle. The whole point and purpose of the Incarnation, the Passion, death, and Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ is that we have a problem that we cannot handle on our own.

The strength of our house is not the charism or vigor of one man who returns now to dust before his rising. No, the strength of our house is a strength Ancient and Everlasting in which he and we are invited to play our parts. He now makes his exit from life’s stage, and we, if we be worth the salt of our tears, we should pray for him now as he awaits the final curtain call, the rising dawn of the Last Day.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.