I have only had a few premonitions in my life. Once when I was maybe four or five, I was playing in the bed of our pick up truck and had this creepy feeling that I had played by the spare tire bolted to the side of the truck before. I looked at the bolts, looked up at the blue-gray morning sky across the field towards the pond at the end of our field, and definitely knew I had been in that exact same spot before. It made enough of an impact that I can bring up that scene in my mind’s eye now, at the end of my 71st year, as clearly as the day it happened.

It wasn’t long. Maybe a few seconds. But it happened.

I wouldn’t say I am a person who is in touch with her inner self. When my mom and I travelled together to Hawaii, the first stop we made after landing was to visit relatives I didn’t know. I got crankier and crankier as the night wore on, and finally my mom turned to me and said, “You’re tired. You need to go to bed and wake up happier.”

I had never connected my mood with my energy level. I realized in that moment, around the age of 27, that I got cranky when I got tired. Imagine that. I had never done a self-check to determine if I might be tired, or not; never paused long enough to assess my general state-of-mind; never thought that I might function better early, or mid-day, or night. I would just go go go until I didn’t. It was a revelation to have my mom point out that fatigue could be a causal factor in my mood. That’s how out-of-touch I am with myself.

My oldest brother Tom died Thanksgiving weekend when he was 46. He would be 81 today, so it was a long time ago. I was 36, married, living in Minnesota. My oldest son was named after him. Tom was somewhat of a father figure to me, being ten years older. He took me skiing the first time, dragging along an eleven year old baby sister to Red Lodge. He bought my ticket and rental equipment, enrolled me in lessons.

When I was fifteen, he taught me how to use a single lens reflex camera so I could take pictures while in Japan. We were in the basement, a scary, dark, unfinished part of the house, but one of the few places a young man would have privacy in a family of eight siblings.

When I became a young woman and didn’t want to waitress for college money, Tom hired me to work on the farm. He was a liberated man who taught me how to run the Allis Chalmers tractor to cultivate corn, and made me hand stack 75 pound bales of hay on the truck while he bucked the bales from the field using the Farmhand loader. He made me so strong!!

His influence and faith that I could do any job he threw at me helped make me the person I am today. He didn’t hoover over me, afraid I might screw up. He put me on the tractor, showed me once what to do, and then left. He didn’t think I couldn’t do the job because I was a girl. Maybe he thought I could do the job because I was a girl.

The day he died I was at work at Cargill, doing whatever was so urgent that I had to go into work on Thanksgiving weekend. I had been alone in the office all day, my husband watching the two kids at home. When I got home, my sister Bernice called me and told me what had happened. He died working a backhoe that was attached to a farm tractor; all but one of his family there, working on a home project.

We all were in shock. Scot and I loaded up the kids and drove the 14 hours back home.

I had to look at the tractor and backhoe. It was parked in their yard. I looked at it from all angles, trying to make sense of it.

Friends and family came as friends and family do when tragedy strikes. The house filled up.

Kimi Nayematsu couldn’t come. She was in a hospital in Billings, late stage cancer taking its toll. Her husband Roy came by the house. The Nayematsu family and our family roots went back to our parents and grandparents. We all farmed in the Valley.

Roy said Kimi was in and out of consciousness. She looked at him, and then looked out the door of her hospital room, and said, “What’s Tommy Koyama doing here? He’s standing at the door.”

Roy turned to look, but of course Tom wasn’t there.

I heard the story, and looked back to my day at work. I so wanted to have had a sense, a feeling, a foreshadowing. I wanted to have had one last connection to my brother as his spirit passed to the other side.

But I didn’t.