Today, April 10, would have been Bonnie’s 81st birthday. She was 4 years my elder, although the Haden mango tree planted to mark my birth had long since outgrown the Piri planted when she was born.

We had celebrated what proved to be her last birthday on April 10, 2016.

In a previous post here, I mused about that evening.

At the end of her life, Bonnie left us with a mystery.
She must have known for some time that she was very sick, but why did she fail to reach out to family and friends?
I don’t have an definitive answer, but she did drop a clue.

The last time I saw Bonnie before she finally called for help and was hospitalized, was to celebrate her 73rd birthday last April (2016).

My wife and I had just finished renovating the old house in Kahala where Bonnie and I grew up, and that day we sat on our deck in the shade of the mango trees planted when Bonnie and I were born.

Bonnie took the occasion to point out the many colorful crotons still thriving around the edges of the yard.

She reminded me these were grown from clipping collected by our Hawaiian grandmother from around the islands. That launched her on the story of our grandmother, who self-diagnosed her own cancer back late 1950s, and quietly decided she could not afford to go to the hospital for medical treatment.

Instead, she packed her bags for the trip of a lifetime. She rode a bus across parts of the mainland she had never seen, sometimes having to ride in the back of the bus due to Southern sensibilities. She traveled to other Pacific islands, including Fiji, Tahiti, and Samoa, and then she crisscrossed Hawaii from one end to the other, seeking out and renewing ties to friends and family, and finding those colorful crotons.

And when her travels were done, she came home, and passed away.

Perhaps Bonnie was just talking about the plants. In retrospect, though, she may have been saying much more. But we’ll never really know.

In any case, here’s a photo of the two of us taken in November 1948. I was about 15 months old. The photo was taken behind our house on Makaiwa Street, which had been converted from farms to suburban houses not long before.

And here we are, somewhere around 1960, gathered around the car we called “Goliath” as my mother prepared to sell it. There are other photos of Bonnie scattered throughout the 20+ years since I started this blog. Someday I’ll go searching for them.

Sept 16, 1960