Happy Chinese New Year, a belated Happy New Year, and a belated Merry Christmas to you all! This is the first part of a two (maybe three) part contemplation on 2009, and my hopes for 2010 and on.

As you probably know, 2009 was a huge year of change for Emi and myself. So, instead of sending out Christmas and New Year’s cards, I am going to be the writer that I aspire to be and relate some of what happened.

Emi had been studying for the GMAT exam to apply for MBA school since early 2008 hiring a counselor, taking classes to boost her math abilities (her English being good enough already), and studying like crazy despite her average 9 am to 9 pm work day (and the occasional week where she and her colleagues at AFLAC would burn the midnight oil). She was really not ready to apply for school by the time the second round of applications (third for some schools) had approached, but Cornell had sent a letter anyway granting her an interview.

Cornell?! Ithaca, right? Out in the middle of nowhere? Freezing weather? Great, top-ranked school, yes, but perhaps somewhere a little closer to home (both Hawaii and Japan)? That was my initial reaction. We decided she should actually travel to Cornell to make sure she actually wanted to go there. In late March, when the temperature was still at freezing and snow still layering the lawns, Emi ventured to Ithaca.

The trip didn’t start well. The propeller plane from Newark Airport to Ithaca Airport broke down, and was delayed some 2 hours. Stuck at a strange, foreign airport at midnight with brusque airline staff certainly did not leave a good impression on her of America.

But Cornell was a different story. The campus, perhaps because of the winter blanket, had a certain romantic quality to it. This was an Academic Institution of the kind you do not find in Japan—sequestered in the Northern Appalachians, current MBA students, her interviewer, and professors were both kind and intelligent. Far from discouraging her, the trip strengthened her resolve. She wait until the fall and apply to Stanford or other schools, she wanted to go here.

Then came the realization, how are we going to pay for this? The financial crisis had ensured that all possibility of financial aid for international students was a distant hope. Savings and loans, and I would work my ass off doing freelance translation, marketing, and be both careful and savvy with my investments. We’ve made it through the first year including moving costs with generous help from Emi’s parents and a loan from Mizuho. Just one year left…

You might want to pause now and grab a cup of hot chocolate. Most end-of-year letters are a page at most, but this was truly a tumultuous year for us, but I’ve only just begun.

Revealing Emi’s plans to her colleagues was a little easier as many of her supervisors were writing recommendation letters for her. AFLAC Japan didn’t want to lose her, of course, but they did not have a program to send employees to earn MBAs any longer. They agreed to keep her on as an employee (paying for her health benefits and qualifying her for company-wide bonuses), but members of the board of directors at both the Japanese subsidiary and the American HQ joked that they would try to keep her busy enough for her to fail her exams. Nevertheless, they were all very proud of her when she announced her acceptance.

It was a little more difficult for me at Wacom. I had informed the executive of my division of the possibility, and he flattered me by claiming he thought I could one day be an executive at the company if I stayed. But, anyone who knows Emi and me well knows that we are inseparable. I couldn’t possibly spend two years apart from her the way some couples can…at least not at this stage in our marriage. So it was with a heavy (and nervous) heart that I informed my supervisors that Emi had indeed been accepted and that I would indeed be leaving the company at the end of summer.

Nothing happens as planned though.

At the end of May, two days before I was to go home for the weekend for one of my best friend’s weddings, I received a call during lunch at work. My mother told me that Baba (what my sisters and I called my father) was in the hospital and had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

What?!

I was standing next to the window at work and had to sit down on the nearest chair. Cancer. He was 86 years old. He had been extremely health his entire life; he had never stayed a night at the hospital. But, the family knew he was getting older, weaker. We took trips during the Christmas holidays to Kauai, Maui, and just the winter before, the Big Island, because we knew the opportunities were dwindling.

But, you can’t avoid the shock when it finally hits. Cancer. It happens often enough to many people, and for each and every one of us who have experience someone close to us being diagnosed with the monster, it’s devastating. Simply devastating.

Luckily, my younger sister Lisa was also planning on returning home at the same time. Fate perhaps? I remember walking into the dimly lit hospital room after the 19-hour trip from Ithaca to Honolulu. He was stronger that I had expected. He watching television I believe. He wanted to go home as soon as possible.

Over the next few days I talked to many doctors, all of whom agreed that in these cases most people live 3 – 6 months. But you also hear about people like Steve Jobs who survive much longer. Years. How do you give up hope? Baba and I talked about taking a trip to San Francisco either before starting chemotherapy or afterwards. We wouldn’t get the chance.

Pancreatic cancer is a silent killer. There are no symptoms until it gets large enough to start affecting the surrounding organs. That’s how the doctors found it. My father was having stomach pain and thought initially there was something wrong with his gall bladder. Indeed there was—the tumor had grown large enough that it was pressing against his bile duct, blocking the flow of fluid into his intestines.

And we were pressed for time. We had to make a decision of how to conduct his treatment. But doctors were difficult to get a hold of, and appointments could not be made immediately. Not that any of them disagreed with the initial diagnosis. The tumor surrounded the major artery in the area, and that made surgery impossible. No, actually, surgery is possible, but surrounding the major artery made surgery both difficult and past results from across the country have indicated that there was no survival benefit. Somehow surrounding the artery was an indication that the cancer was already spreading to other organs.

It didn’t matter in the end. The fear of cancer is that it will grow large enough to stop the function of your organs. Or that it will sap your strength so much (since it too is growing), that you will become weak. Weak enough for diseases and infection to take hold. Usually, in people his age, that is pneumonia. With my father, it was an infection in his gall bladder that spread eventually into his bloodstream. He died on Sept. 10, 2009. He was 87.

Yes, he was 87, not 86. His birthday was Sept. 8th, and he lived to see it.