Last couple of days have been tough for me. More than two friends have told me (separately) about their hardships in life, which made my heart sink. I had my own disappointments-very minor compared to my friends’, but still-that made me think about my relationships with people around me.

And yesterday. Yesterday I was in a local children’s bookstore when I saw a dad and his son. The boy was around my son’s age and he looked a lot like my friend’s son, who lives in Ottawa.
I glanced at the dad and realized indeed he is the friend from Ottawa.

He is my friend’s cousin. He was living in Japan for few years, and eventually married a Japanese girl(whom I will cal H).
My friend introduced us, and we exchanged emails for few months and met for the first time couple of years ago.
H is from a city that is very close to where I’m from, so we hit it off talking about our hometowns.

Last time I saw H was exactly an year ago, March 1st, 2010, here in Victoria.

That March day last year, H and the family were passing through Victoria on their way to Ottawa to permanently move there.
She and I took our kids to the park, and then we went for a coffee.

At that time, in my personal life, my ex-husband and I had just decided to separate, but hadn’t told many people about it.
I had also met somebody special and had just started dating him.

When I was having coffee with H, he happened to drop by at the coffee shop to say hello. I had not told H about what was happening in my marriage(after all, we had so much to talk about her new life in Canada), so I just introduced him as a friend.
At the time, H’s English wasn’t too good, so she kept asking me in Japanese questions like, “How do you know him?” “Is he your husband’s friend?”, which I had hard time answering truthfully.

Eventually it was time to say goodbye, and I wished her well and they left for Ottawa.

Few months later, I had found out H had become very ill. Liver cancer. They could not treat her in Ottawa so they had rented a place in Toronto so that she can get treatments.

Few weeks ago, I sent her a message. I told her what happened in my marriage, and the man she saw was somebody really dear to me, and that I am thinking about her a lot. She said she was happy to know that I am happy now, and that day I was acting funny and she wondered if anything was going on between he and I. We shared a good chuckle(virtually) over the incident.

After that, I found out she had moved to Japan to try different type of treatment that is only available in Japan. She went by herself, leaving her husband and her son behind for now.

Then, yesterday I saw the husband and son. Exactly year later. I didn’t even know they were in town. What are the chances?

When I started talking to him about H, I could not stop crying. He said this past year has been really tough for them. “What happened after we moved to Canada was, just so bad.”
But now they were on their way to Japan. We exchanged phone numbers so that we can get the kids together before they leave because he has no idea when they will be back in Canada….

Sometimes life brings extraordinary things. Many of us are going though poignant times in life right now, but these extraordinary moments give us a glimmer of hope there might be light at the end of the dark tunnel.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 3rd, 2011 at 7:24 am and is filed under Life, Reflection, Relationships. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.