Episode 95: Anohana: The Flower We Saw that Day (And Maybe Every Day)

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As a person, I am insecure about many things. None of which might be grounded in reality. As a podcaster, I am insecure about many things, and those may--in fact--be founded in reality. And my terrible editing. But okay, ignoring my terrible joke. In terms of who I am, I’ve always been a bit concerned that I may be a bit of a downer and not so much intentionally. Rather, I worry that my life experience--you know, losing my dad at a young age and after a long illness--changed me on the figurative equivalent of a cellular level, which included being a bit of a downer. Grief can change you, I think I’ve heard people say. And I was so young when it happened. 

To validate this concern, I always turn to my taste in stories. Since my dad died, I’ve been drawn towards dramas or sadder stories, the sorts of things that let you get a good cry out. Before he died, well, I actually don’t remember that. Not much at all. But if I had to guess, I was already on the cusp of switching over from children’s cartoons with their overly joyful and sanitized countenance to media targeted at young adults, often but not always with an overly sweet coating but still approaching a sense of realism. 

The timing of it all muddles the waters a bit, and this was also all over a decade ago. So at this point, can I really know if this was a problem? No. I can only know I was worried that it was a problem. I know that I put up this self-deprecating wall, and behind that wall I put many of my interests. Because it just made sense to do so. This wasn’t how I thought I was supposed to react. It’s certainly not how most people would handle it. Or that’s what I thought. Children’s books about grief and heartache are somewhat rare but will always have happy endings or endings predicated on the character’s--and by extension our--ability to overcome these issues. Which was what was expected of us. Death will bring sadness, but those emotions weren’t meant to last forever. They happen, and then you move on. Except I didn’t. Not exactly, anyway.

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Hi. It’s M. Welcome to episode 95.

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Which is another reason why I was insecure, I guess. Sorry, that’s an awkward return from the intro. What I mean is: for the most part, I’ve noticed that we conceptualize grief and the emotional hellstorm that comes with it as something more like a tunnel than the cloud that I just implied that it was. A cloud can move about or change form, shape, and/or grow, and it’s not something you can just pass through; it could very well follow you around, just to make everything worse. Tunnels are temporary. Tunnels you get through in a set amount of time, and it’s pretty obvious where that tunnel is. So obvious, in fact, that you can create strong and socially enforceable expectations of when someone who has gone through a traumatic loss can get over it, as it were, and get to the other side. Normalcy--otherwise unspecified--is the default we all drift towards, and no diversion in one’s personal life--even an incomprehensible amount of hurt and heartache--is exempt from that rule.

Bizarrely enough, I would hesitate to say that this is inflicted on us. To an extent it is, but that would ignore the other half of it: the tendency to embrace that belief because of what it promises. We do want to believe that everything will somehow go back to being okay because okay was at least bearable, and woo boy the emotional pain of grief crosses over into the physical way too much.

Appealing as that all may be, it’s woefully inaccurate, and the desire to escape the emotional turmoil of grief means very little. You can’t really get more than a temporary reprieve. Now, don’t get me wrong; those escapes are critical times that let you recharge your figurative battery, which is what gets you through the worst of it. Or the slightly less bad of it. 

Speaking from personal experience, grief is a never ending onslaught. It intensifies from time to time, but even when it’s calm, it never fully goes away. We just pretend it isn’t there, which makes the experience of grieving so much more isolating. And that was why I liked sad, tragic, or emotionally darker stories. Engaging in them gave me moments when I didn’t have to be so isolated or feel like I was. Beyond that, reading sad things was a socially acceptable context for my sadness after I had passed through that acceptable grief period. Obviously, sad stories are meant to provoke a sad reaction. Obviously, these reminders of my experiences were going to reawaken those feelings in me. 

That’s why I looked up Anohana: The Flower We Saw that Day.

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Anohana: The Flower We Saw that Day is an animated show that’s streaming on Netflix, and while there is a lot more to the show than that, this is technically the other reason why I checked it out. Netflix has a growing catalog of anime, and because I’m already paying for Netflix, I might as well hit up that catalog and get as much out of it as I can. Just common sense.

But I had heard many positive things about Anohana. Well, I heard that it was sad but beautiful. And in anime circles, the various artistic choices that go into a show like this were praised beyond measure. So clearly it was a good choice.

But to get into the weeds, as it were. Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day is a 2011 Japanese anime television series created by the artist collective known as the Super Peace Busters, which is a name that lands in a very different way after watching the show. In terms of plot… Once upon a time, six middle school kids had a friendship pact that was stronger than literally anything. We all know of childhood bonds that are thicker than thieves or maybe we were in them ourselves. But then one of them--Menma--died in a tragic accident, and not being able to fully comprehend, never mind cope, with their grief, the Super Peace Busters drifted apart. To a great extent, they all moved on with their lives, developed their own identities, found new social groups, and those sorts of things. 

But then there was Jinta who lost his mother around the time Menma died, and despite how sociable and daring he was in his younger days, he’s become fairly reclusive, which I guess technically means he could spend some time figuring out something for Menma. See, her ghost appeared to him one day. But not the ghost of child-Menma. She’s his age, having apparently been affected by time in the same way he has, despite being a ghost. Look, that part is never fully explained, but there are lines you can read between.

The short of it is that ghost Menma (if she is a ghost and not a hallucination) doesn’t think she’s been able to pass on normally. She’s somewhat stuck on this side of the proverbial line, so you would think that all these years, she’s been on the side of the living as a ghost, just one that hasn’t been apparent or obvious. If she is a ghost and not a hallucination, which is a big if, Jinta isn’t entirely sure which she is for a fair bit of the story and the other Super Peace Busters have their own opinions and reasons for having those opinions. But if Menma is a ghost, she isn’t able to pass on because she has a wish that needs to be fulfilled. Apparently, it’s pressing enough to be in the ‘unfinished business’ category, and she attributes her presence and Jinta’s ability to see her to that issue. But because ghost-Menma doesn’t remember what her wish was, Jinta has to gather up the rest of the Super Peace Busters and get them to help him to figure it out. Which he’s reluctant to do, and they’re reluctant to get involved because they’ve moved on, and they have their own all maladaptive coping mechanisms to help them get through, or so they think.. 

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Okay, look, they might be high school students, but they know darn well that if they help Menma, it’s going to reopen all the wounds that her death left with them, which is going to suck and be horrifying and is something everyone else in the world would probably rather they not do. Life was supposed to move on after Menma, and while it did, it wasn’t what it could have been. It should have had her in it, and that knowledge hasn’t really helped them much at all. All of them are plagued with various forms of guilt after Menma’s accident. They just don’t talk about it. 

I’m not going to spoil what Menma’s wish was. Not just because I don’t like spoilers in these episodes, even if they aren’t fully avoidable all the time, but because that’s not the point I wanted to talk about. 

I went into Anohana looking for an outlet for my usual heartache, for a reason to settle into the pain I always carry after losing so many people I was extremely close to before I was 25, but what I got was the assurance that crying about these losses sometimes, if not outright sobbing over them, is okay. Granted, there’s a balance to strike, but the youthful impulse to embrace one’s emotions as part of the moment or one’s journey isn’t the detriment you’re told it is.

See there’s another thing to note about potential-ghost-Menma that you somewhat notice when you start watching the show but doesn’t entirely jump out at you. Ghost Menma is incredibly child-like, which might make sense because that’s how Jinta would remember her, but at the same time, it’s a perception of her that the audience has--I would wager--because they’re bringing their expectations of adulthood into the show. 

In the same way grief is supposed to be contained, childish impulses are as well. But Menma hasn’t grown up emotionally in the same way other characters have. She can be impulsive, overly innocent, drawn to toys, empathetic, and a bit of a cry baby though we see her being incredibly if not exhaustively cheery and joyful. Really, it’s Jinta that thinks of her as a bit of a cry baby, but that’s not entirely accurate. The truth of it is that she has not learned to shelve her emotions in the same way her friends have. Because, you know, she didn’t have to grieve her own death. She’s… how she was back then and had never learned to be otherwise.

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Weirdly enough, Menma is really the most objective person about her death. Because she doesn’t feel the same sadness nor the social pressure to move on or the guilt for doing just that, those things that her friends are weighed down by. She understands that her friends might have been changed, in some way, but there was no reason they should be figuratively destroyed or even just miserable over what happened to her. She still cares about them deeply. That stayed with her too. Because she never had a reason to give it up. Whether or not she’s a ghost, she still loves her friends.

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I know the framing of this story isn’t going to land with some people, and I certainly respect that perspective, which is why I don’t typically tell it. But to get to the beginning of it: to be Filipino is to be Catholic. To be married to a Filipino, like my dad was, is essentially to be no more than two steps removed from Catholicism, but my dad had converted before he met my mother, even though he never explained why. Which is why we had a Catholic funeral for him, and even though Catholic priests have a reputation and a lot of Christian leaders are just out of touch more generally, our priest wasn’t. 

See, at the point my father died, our priest had lost both his parents, an older sister to suicide, and a younger brother to stomach cancer. In fact, he’d actually gone through all of that before entering the priesthood, so he knew about grief in a way no other Catholic priest did and maybe ever will. 

Was this enough to prevent my emotional decline? No, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. 

That priest said a lot of things to me in the week after my dad died that made a lot of sense looking back but that thirteen year old me wasn’t ready to hear or was going to need validated by some other source. One of them was that love endures. Beyond the veil of death, love will endure, and theologically, that’s significant, but if you don’t like the Catholic belief, there’s still parts of that ambiguous idea that makes sense for you. 

In short, love endures. The love you have for someone who has died will endure, but without a place to land--without the physical person to receive it, the act of loving, which is an act that sustains us--will fall a bit flat. So we’re perpetually always falling flat, face first even. And of course that’s going to hurt. Which is a great reason to be a bit kinder to ourselves on that front. To set aside social expectations that aren’t grounded in reality but a fairly pleasant lie.

That explains why our pain endures, I think, but on the other hand--the hand Menma would likely be holding--there’s no reason to let guilt swallow you up. The dead’s love for us also endures, despite however it was that they died. They who are the most objective about what has happened--who understand the story better than anyone else, who don’t have hurt and trauma and guilt to cope with--are still rooting for us, are still rooting for us to overcome our challenges, and even if they can’t tell us because we aren’t the one’s having visions of them, they would want us to preserve ourselves, not to be consumed by feelings of our own guilt and shame.

Really, when looking at grief as a dialogue of love, things start to make a bit more sense. It’s a disjointed conversation, and the frustration of a broken communication line does not go away, no matter how badly we want it to. 

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If you have lost someone who mattered to you, I don’t have to tell you how hard it is to to pretend that everything is fine, when it definitely is not. These are things we know to be true, but they are unspoken truths that Anohana breathes life into. Among other things. 

Anohana: The Flower We Saw that Day touches on various aspects of grief, loss, growing up, and coming of age through the various members of the Super Peace Busters. But this part, this affirmation of a state of being that I know I’m in even though I pretend otherwise, this affirmation that love of all forms endures is what I needed the most. I still need it. 

I know my father’s death has changed me in some ways. I know that my resulting dysfunction has closed off paths I would have potentially gone down, paths that he may have wanted me to go down, but at the same time, after watching Anohana, I’ve come to the conclusion that… That I’ve always been and still am doing the best I can. I’m moving on with my life and trying to make it a happy one, occasionally crying because that’s what it means to embrace all of my emotions, for better or worse, even and especially when the world tells me not to. 

And that’s not nothing. I’m not nothing. I am loved by people who just aren’t here anymore. Which, yes, is a bit sad, but that’s somewhat the point.

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This has been a production of Miscellany Media Studios with music licensed from the Sounds like an Earful music supply. Thanks for listening! Find more information about our shows at miscellanymedia.online or follow us on Twitter @miscellanymedia for updates on current and future projects.

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