Every morning, when he rises, Eugene Wilce lights the candles in front of a portrait photograph of Mitsuko Wilce. He brews her a cup of the green tea she loved. He fills a small bowl with her favorite berries and a tangerine and places them on the sideboard by her picture. He tells his late wife how sweet she made his life.
Six times a year since she died in his arms early in the morning of Sept. 28, 2000, Eugene Wilce tells News Tribune readers how beautiful, how beloved his wife was. On Christmas, Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, her birthday, their anniversary, and the anniversary of her death, he provides the proof in words of deep grief under a photograph of her in the In Memoriam announcements.
For him, there was never any other woman.
Love leapt into his heart the moment he saw her.
He was stationed with the Army in Yokohama, Japan, running the enlisted men’s club in 1949.
“I was sitting on a stone wall, waiting for some buddies,” he said. “She got off the bus with her sister. I took one look at her and couldn’t help myself.”
He ran after her, and in his passable Japanese, asked her name.
Frightened of him, she lied.
“Kimiko,” she said, and hurried off with her sister.
Every day for six weeks Wilce went back to the bus stop, hoping to see her again. No luck. Then, sitting with his Japanese driver one day, he spotted two girls.
“One of them was her, and my driver was her brother’s best friend,” Wilce said, smiling at the astounding luck of that moment.
With the help of his friend and her brother, he embarked on a courtship framed in modesty. Wilce, who called Mitsuko “Kim” as a reference to their first meeting, would come to her home and visit with her whole family. It was six months before her parents allowed him to take her to a movie.
At first, none of the people dearest to the young couple approved.
“Her family liked me, but they were against it because they knew she would end up in the States,” he said.
“I didn’t tell my family,” said.
He worried that, back home in Pennsylvania, his brothers, who had fought in that war, and his sister, who had served as a nurse, would be unkind to the woman he loved.
Over their two-year courtship, the couple won their families over to support the marriage.
Gene and his Kim married in Buddhist and Christian ceremonies and applied for her to come to the United States.
A colonel who disapproved of soldiers marrying Japanese women “lost” the application for six months. He came home without her, then worked all his connections to be sent to the war in Korea, so he could be near her.
After the war, he managed to get stationed in Japan.
Finally, he took her home to Pennsylvania.
“Mom and Dad took her under their wing,” Wilce said. “As far as they were concerned, she was their daughter.”
The Wilces had two sons, Eugene and James. The family followed Wilce’s career to California, then after he enlisted in the Air Force, to Washington.
After he went into civil service with the military, the family settled in Lakewood.
His Kim, he said, was a perfect mother, an ideal grandmother and a woman quick to make friends.
But when her husband had the chance to retire in his mid-50s, she wanted nothing more than to be with him.
“You put in your paperwork,” she told him.
“The next day she took me out to look at motor homes,” he said. “She’d saved money. She bought me one, and paid cash for it.”
They went to every national park in the West, and Reno and Las Vegas every year.
“If I hadn’t retired early, we wouldn’t have had that,” he said.
At home, after he survived a heart attack, she dragged him with her on her five-mile walks at Lakewood Mall until he could keep up with her. Everywhere they walked, they held hands.
It was, he said, a life of joy beyond dreams, until the day her doctor told them she had terminal cancer and six months.
“She didn’t cry or get upset,” he said. “She turned to me and said, “Gene, I’m sorry. I ruined everything.’”
She kept the illness from her friends until she lost her beautiful hair, he said. She never complained.
Early on her last September morning, she awoke in her own bed, in her husband’s arms.
“She gave me a big, beautiful smile, said ‘I love you,’ and that was it,” Wilce said, and wept.
“After that, I threw away all my medications. I didn’t want to live any more.”
Their children and grandchildren have turned him back toward life. They visit him, cherish him, and have put him to work transferring the thousands of family photos and hundreds of hours of happy home movies onto DVD.
And every morning there is the lovely face of his bride, smiling from the portrait on the sideboard, lit by candle lamps, with a cup of green tea and a bowl of fresh fruit nearby. There is the small daily ceremony that keeps him close to her, cherishing he sweetness she brought him.
“Nobody has tangerines now, but I do,” he said. “I get them sent to me, the clementines she loved.”
Kathleen Merryman: 253-597-8677
