Before Your Memory Fades (Before the Coffee Gets Cold, #3)

by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Nagare Tokita was hearing his wife’s voice for the first time in fourteen years.

“Well, surviving alone is much the same as dying alone, don’t you think?”

Since her parents died, she had looked at this photo and felt estranged, like a bystander, as though she was not included in the scene. But that was incorrect. She had been part of it.

“Picture the future you want to see,” and “Drink the coffee before it gets cold.”

“Because my love runs deeper than any grudge.”

“I’ve never thought that death was the end.” He mulled over his words, and then continued. “She is always inside me. She’s living inside us both...” Us both, of course, meaning him and his daughter, Miki.

People’s true feelings are not in plain sight. The other person might not be thinking anything, but there is a tendency to just assume what the other is feeling without reaching out and asking.

“Thank you for having me,” Miki had told her mother, and these words of hers gave Kei an energy that we call hope. Inside every person is an inherent capability to make it through any kind of difficulty. Everyone has that energy. But sometimes when that energy flows via our anxiety valve, the flow can be restricted. The greater that anxiety, the greater the strength needed to open the valve and release the energy. That strength is empowered by hope. You could say that hope is the power to believe in the future.

She’s the type of person who thinks too much about the other person’s feelings and suppresses her own.