by Royal » Sat Jan 01, 2011 9:35 am
The father of Japanese gf of mine died in an accident.
I went to the funereal.
I won't bore you with all the gory details of what that entails.......like (it was eight of us, the close family only, so I was flattered to be with them) picking through the smouldering burnt remains of a loved one off the concrete gurney straight out of/next to the furnace with chopsticks and putting them in the box/earn. (I kid you not)
The charred bones are not ground to powder. Each piece of charred bone it picked up by TWO people with their chopsticks.
That's why it's a no-no to have two people hold one piece of food with chopsticks. Bad omen. Not done.
In the evening of the day of the cremation a box of his remains were on a shrine in a room of their small house.
On the shrine was a Buddhist bell & beater that the monks had been using that evening.
That night, eight of us, including his widow, (seven family members & me), slept on the floor in the room with the shrine.
At about 2.30am, we were ALL awakened by three loud chimes of the bell.
We ALL woke up, lights on, no one playing jokes.....we ALL heard it.
He (her late father) was a strong/good, straight as a die, mans-man......there were hundreds at his wake, I've never seem so many big, tough looking guys (military, fisherman, police, mayor etc) cry.....almost unable to get through their speeches, he was so very popular, having helped many people with their problems & we now think that if he was able to thank us by sending a sign, he was strong minded, he would have.
The bell defiantly rang.......not any one of us did it.
We have no effective screening methods to make sure pilots are sane.— Dr. Herbert Haynes, FAA.