I do not well remember what reply I made to her about this. However, it was scarcely five days later — certainly not much more — that she was prostrated by fever. While she was sick, she fainted one day and was for a short time quite unconscious. We hurried to her, and when she soon regained her senses, she looked at me and my brother as we stood by her, and said, in inquiry, “Where was I?” Then looking intently at us, dumb in our grief, she said, “Here in this place shall you bury your mother.” I was silent and held back my tears; but my brother said something, wishing her the happier lot of dying in her own country and not abroad. When she heard this, she fixed him with her eye and an anxious countenance, because he savored of such earthly concerns, and then gazing at me she said, “See how he speaks.” Soon after, she said to us both: “Lay this body anywhere, and do not let the care of it be a trouble to you at all. Only this I ask: that you will remember me at the Lord’s altar, wherever you are.” And when she had expressed her wish in such words as she could, she fell silent, in heavy pain with her increasing sickness.
But as I thought about thy gifts, O invisible God, which thou plantest in the heart of thy faithful ones, from which such marvelous fruits spring up, I rejoiced and gave thanks to thee, remembering what I had known of how she had always been much concerned about her burial place, which she had provided and prepared for herself by the body of her husband. For as they had lived very peacefully together, her desire had always been — so little is the human mind capable of grasping things divine — that this last should be added to all that happiness, and commented on by others: that, after her pilgrimage beyond the sea, it would be granted her that the two of them, so united on earth, should lie in the same grave.
When this vanity, through the bounty of thy goodness, had begun to be no longer in her heart, I do not know; but I joyfully marveled at what she had thus disclosed to me — though indeed in our conversation in the window, when she said, “What is there here for me to do any more?” she appeared not to desire to die in her own country. I heard later on that, during our stay in Ostia, she had been talking in maternal confidence to some of my friends about her contempt of this life and the blessing of death. When they were amazed at the courage which was given her, a woman, and had asked her whether she did not dread having her body buried so far from her own city, she replied: “Nothing is far from God. I do not fear that, at the end of time, he should not know the place whence he is to resurrect me.” And so on the ninth day of her sickness, in the fifty-sixth year of her life and the thirty-third of mine, that religious and devout soul was set loose from the body.
I closed her eyes; and there flowed in a great sadness on my heart and it was passing into tears, when at the strong behest of my mind my eyes sucked back the fountain dry, and sorrow was in me like a convulsion.
Augustine, Confessions, Book IX, chapter xi, writing about his mother’s dying. I read these lines every year on the Feast of Saint Monica, the 4th of May—I reread the Confessions yearly—and they always water my eyes. The thought of dying away from home is unwelcome in any country, and this was true only more so in the cultures of the Ancient Near East. Monica is one of history’s great mothers. She and her husband Patricius recognized early that their son was prodigiously gifted—Augustine remains one of the brightest luminaries in intellectual history—and they made great sacrifices to provide him with the best possible education. (He would be tutored in rhetoric by Ambrose, the venerable Bishop of Milan. The expression, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”? That’s Ambrose giving counsel to Augustine.)
God willing, like Augustine someday I’ll bury my Yokohama mama far away from her ancestors. And as for my Dad, I don’t know that he’s read the Confessions, but on my okasan’s 70th birthday he more or less quoted Monica verbatim. All of us children had come home for the occasion when, over coffee, Mom brought up the subject of where she and Dad would be buried. Dad will have privileges at Arlington National Cemetery, but when the time comes he said to all of us kids, “I don’t care where you bury me. You can tell the mortician when he lays me out to point my toes. You can get a maul and pound me in the ground wherever you want because the Lord will know where to find me.”