Remembering Ted… with a laugh and a tear
Ted Hattori died this week. If you ever had the chance to know Ted, you know this has been a very sad week in our church office. For those who did not have the honor, I share this week’s ponderings.
Ted was charming, the kind of charming that only comes when people are extra smart. I was new in town, my office was still unpacked, when Ted arrived with a single carnation, a story, and an invitation for lunch with he and another church member. He made old fashioned words like chivalry and gallant come alive with the twinkle in his eye. When heading a search committee for a staff position at church some years back, he penned a report to the pastor under the allonym Albert Camus, introducing the candidate as the ‘one who will be a stranger no more’. Strangers for Ted were unmet friends. The pastor saved the letter, and in the days after Ted’s death I stumbled across it. Ted was still making me laugh.
Ted was compassionate, the kind of compassion that is rooted deep in one’s soul, the kind that reflects the choice to live when the world says die. Ted spent too many of his young years behind barbed wire when his California family was sent to a camp just south of Missouri during WW2 for the sole crime of being born with Japanese heritage. When Ted and Carolyn married in 1962, their pastor travelled with them to Illinois because the law in Missouri forbade their marriage. Perhaps it was because his own heritage was publicly scorned that Ted learned not only pride in his heritage but also the importance of moving beyond tolerance towards embrace. Having been the one excluded, his life was a gentle but persistent stream of inclusion.
Ted was the kind of guy who was friends with both the quarterback and the geek. He had a circle of close friends with whom he socialized and traveled, and a much beloved family, but his embrace was open and his capacity to accept new people and new ideas appeared endless. And he noticed people whom others were prone to overlook; he made a point of inquiring about them, inviting them, including them… until they became us. I’ve no doubt that much of who we are as an Open and Affirming congregation committed to increasing diversity is a testimony to Ted’s gentle but persistent work in our midst.
Ted was a private man. Although his stories included bits of his own life story, they were never about him. In fact his stories were often a fascinating web of fact and fiction, and as I collected bits of his own story over the years, I routinely did ‘fact checks’ with Carolyn while Ted smiled coyly in the background. Not surprisingly he didn’t talk much about his illnesses in these most recent years. The illnesses slowed his stories, made it hard for him to be in groups that had once been lifelines. Gradually he slipped from the daily life of our community, and those of us privileged to know him missed him deeply.
We will gather at church on Saturday at 2pm to bear witness to God’s love made known in Ted’s life, made at once easy for the plentiful example and hard for the depth of our loss.
