'EWA — About four months before his wife was murdered, Bryan Yamashita began wondering to himself how he could ever go on without her.

It was an inexplicable, nagging thought that appeared at random every few weeks. And then 43-year-old Asa Yamashita — Bryan's wife of 16 years, the mother of their two adopted daughters and the beloved "reading strategies coach" at Wai'anae High School — was stabbed to death by an apparent stranger on Feb. 27 as she waited for Bryan to pick her up at the Ewa Town Center.

There is only one way that Yamashita can reconcile the worst experience of his life with the thoughts that had entered his mind weeks before.

"God was trying to prepare me," he said.

Yamashita, a social studies teacher at Nanakuli High School, does not know what will come out of his wife's death. But he believes it will be good and it will be grand.

"Where 99 percent of people would be bitter and angry, Bryan is just so positive," said his friend, Elton Kinoshita, one of the vice principals at James Campbell High School where Yamashita once taught. "He's just so unusual. I've never known him to get angry."

Asa's three sisters are helping Yamashita with his daughters, and he has been talking to his brother, a pastor, nearly every day since Asa's death.

But there is no escaping the sadness that hangs over Yamashita and his two daughters, Katie, 7, and Tori, who turns 5 tomorrow.

In many ways, Yamashita feels that he has been preparing for this time in his life almost since birth, when he learned early on that good things can come from bad times.

As a boy, he turned a birth defect into a strength that gave him uncommon courage and earned him respect as the gutsy one-armed kid from Kalani High School who played on the varsity football and wrestling teams.

The lessons he learned three decades ago have evolved into an unyielding faith that today is carrying him through these dark days.

And now, at age 50, Yamashita must learn to overcome again and create a new life without his wife.

BORN WITH BIRTH DEFECT

Bryan Yamashita was born in Hilo on Jan. 7, 1959, with a congenital birth defect that left him with no arm below his left elbow.

His parents never wondered who might be responsible for what had happened to their third of four sons. They certainly never considered suing anyone, Yamashita said.

"My father said, 'Cannot grow his arm back. Let's take him home,' " Yamashita said. "My father never blamed anybody. Why would I? You learn from your parents."

Yamashita's maternal grandfather flew to Hilo from Kaua'i, held his newest grandson in his arms and told Yamashita's mother, "Don't worry. He'll be fine."

Outside of the family, not everyone was so supportive of the toddler with one arm, who at one time was the poster child for Easter Seals in Hawai'i.

"Growing up was rough, rough," Yamashita said. "It was rough. Just rough. Kids say stuff."

His parents were both educators — father, Victor, eventually took over as principal at Manoa Elementary School, and mother, Tomiko, was a supervisor at what was then known as Diamond Head School for the Deaf and Blind.

They taught their boy important lessons about living life on his own terms.

Shriner's Hospital gave young Bryan a prosthesis that included a metal hook, which he nicknamed "Tobey" for no reason that he can remember.

As a young boy, probably in kindergarten, Bryan remembered, he once slid down a slide and caught a boy in the head with his hook, cutting the boy's head open.

The legend of Bryan and his prosthetic arm grew around the playgrounds of 'Aina Haina and he learned to use the hook as a badge of identity.

"It made me look like Captain Hook," he said. "To this day, I've never gotten into a fight. That hook protected me."

He would sometimes grind and buff the metal hook in shop class for effect and to make a statement to the other boys.

"I had like a grudge," he said.

STANDOUT ATHLETE

When he got to Kalani High School, the younger brother who had been schooled in sports by his big brothers found an outlet for his frustrations.

He wasn't allowed to wear his prosthesis, so Yamashita wrestled and played center and offensive guard for the junior varsity and varsity wrestling and football teams with only one arm.

"When I played sports, I had a chip on my shoulder," Yamashita said. "'I'm going to show you that I'm better than you and I'm going to beat you.' It gave me an edge."

George Goto, the former wrestling coach at Moanalua High School, does not know Yamashita but remembers watching the 5-foot-8, 155-pound, one-armed wrestler from the stands.

"He was very strong, a muscular-type guy," Goto said. "I don't think they (opponents) quite figured out how to handle that type of situation. As a high school student, he must have overcome quite a bit. It must have taken a lot of courage, lots of guts, just to go out for a sport with one arm. He pretty much had to build himself to make himself competitive."

Kinoshita was a 10th-grade junior varsity nose tackle for Leilehua High School, which dominated Kalani in student body enrollment and in muscle on the football field.

But Yamashita, playing center directly across from Kinoshita, made his presence known.

He had beefed up to 170 pounds and "was a tough guy," Kinoshita said. "He was quick. He was tenacious, that's probably the best word. You couldn't get by him. He would just keep coming and coming and coming."

Kalani's football team got beat "week after week," Yamashita said. "It was no fun. Those were the beginnings of the really bad years for Kalani."

The experience had a profound effect on him.

"Sports is a wonderful way to develop character," Yamashita said. "It teaches you to overcome adversity."

Sports also provided many of what Yamashita calls his "God moments in life that were real powerful."

At the junior varsity wrestling championships, Yamashita was paired with an opponent he had met once before in a match that ended in a tie.

Yamashita, nervous and unsure, turned to the bleachers and began to pray.

"Oh God," he said, "please help me."

The nervousness instantly disappeared and Yamashita felt a warmth and calm embrace him.

When he turned around to face the mat, "I knew I was going to win," he said.

He did, by a score of 3-0.

LOVE FOR TEACHING

After graduating from the University of Hawai'i with an economics degree, Yamashita got a job as a loan officer at Liberty Bank and "I hated it," he said. "I didn't like working 70 hours a week and making money for somebody else. I was just so miserable."

He tried selling insurance and hated that just as much.

He really wanted to be an educator, like his parents, but there were no teaching jobs to be found on O'ahu at the time.

So Yamashita took a leap of faith. He went back to UH and received his teaching certificate in 1986 and ended up finding a rare teaching opening at Farrington High School, where Asa had graduated three years before.

"I loved it," he said. "Once you get that bug, you just have to teach."

Asa had returned to her alma mater to help out with graduation and met the young social studies teacher who would become her husband.

"To this day, I love Farrington," Yamashita said. "Those Farrington kids are tough, but they have big hearts."

The man who had been taunted as a boy quickly learned to address his birth defect head-on to his students.

"He told us all about his arm," said Joshua Mercado, a 26-year-old UH political science student who had Yamashita in two classes at Campbell. "He told us how he used to stick his arm in front of his opponents to throw them off."

Yamashita's version is slightly different.

"At the beginning of each year, I'd say, 'This is me. This is how it happened. Let's go.' "

TESTING HIS FAITH

Life was good after Bryan and Asa married in 1993.

They adopted a baby girl from China, then went back together as a family to adopt another.

And Asa helped deepen Bryan's faith.

It had never been tested before like the day when Asa went to help Katie's fun-run day at Holomua Elementary, visited the dentist, went shopping for Tori's upcoming birthday, got her hair cut and then sat on a concrete bench at Ewa Town Center, eating saimin.

Her car battery had died and Bryan was running 15 minutes late to pick her up, right before they would have to make two more stops to retrieve their daughters.

But when Yamashita finally arrived at the strip mall, he saw police crime scene tape and a knot of police officers and detectives where Asa should have been.

Yamashita did not know that a suspect, Tittleman Fauatea, 25, had been arrested and would later be charged with second-degree murder in the attack because Yamashita got a call from Hawai'i Medical Center West telling him that his wife had gone into cardiac arrest and he should come immediately.

As he inched his way up Fort Weaver Road in a panic, Yamashita remembered a scene from the Tom Hanks movie, "Castaway," in which Hanks' character tells a friend that he survived life on a remote island by simply taking one breath after another.

As the scene flashed before him, Yamashita forced himself to take one breath after another and instantly calmed down.

When he arrived at the hospital, Yamashita was taken aside by a police officer who told him that his wife was dead. But Yamashita still had to pick up their daughters. He picked up Katie at school, and as he made his way back down busy Fort Weaver Road to Tori's preschool, Katie knew that something was terribly wrong.

"What is it?" Yamashita remembered her asking. "Did Mom die?"

Katie went into hysterics, Yamashita said, and after a long and brutal evening, he finally flipped on the television looking for a distraction in the middle of the night.

He suddenly came upon the exact scene in "Castaway" in which Hanks makes his speech about taking one breath at a time.

"I look for everyday signs of God," Yamashita said. "That's what sustains me."

At a candlelight vigil for Asa at Wai'anae High School Tuesday night, Yamashita told Asa's students, co-workers, friends and complete strangers not to be overcome by negative feelings.

"Please don't be angry," he told the standing-room-only crowd of 1,000 people that spilled out of the school cafeteria and into the night. "You've got to let it go. It's not going to help. ... This death will not be in vain, I promise. ... Look for opportunity for change and rebirth because that would honor my wife."

Yamashita then waited around to hug and shake hands with every single person who wanted to greet him.

Last week, as the phone in his house rang incessantly with well-wishers and friends checking on him, Yamashita's emotions swung from grief to hope.

"I want my wife back," he said. "I want my life back. I don't want to raise my kids alone. But in many ways, I feel like everything that has happened before has prepared me for this terrible thing."