memories of my grandmother no.3
It was a call that made me weak at the knees and turned my fingers into pudding. As my handphone slipped from my grasp, my mother’s words reverberated in my mind: the nurse said that her vitals are crashing.
I only knew stock market crashes - red lines zig-zagged across the screen, moving up, down, up down incessantly like a pulse thundering ‘I’m still alive!’. Because there was never a permanent down. But within my grandmother’s flesh, stranded between parchment skin and glass bones, lie a pulse crashing down.
It was the third time that we’ve received a similar call from the hospice. By then, we had an alarm fatigue: the two previous occasions saw us instantly dropping whatever we were doing, and rushing across the island to her bedside. It wasn’t so much an Asian obligation to be by her side as she drew her last breath, as it was our desire to say our proper farewells as she slips gently into the night that would take her forever away from us. But she was a fighter, had always been. She clung on tight to life each time, prolonging her pain and suffering for yet another morning.
By the second time, I didn’t know what to feel. My bosses were taking tasks away from me, out of consideration for my situation, but I gradually resented that. I feared being eventually side-lined because of the numerous times I had to excuse myself from work just to be with her. In the next instant, I would berate myself mentally. She was the grandmother I loved so much; how could I even begin to resent her? How could I repay her love for me - her bearing the pain for so long just to wait for my return home - by being so unfilial?
So when the third call came, when I saw my mother’s name flash on my phone, not again, I thought. Such fatigue that when the words - the very tone and language in which it was said - robbed me of breath.
Until that moment, I’ve never cried in office. Tears, I believed, would make me seem weak and incompetent. Vulnerable. Battles at work could never be won by tears. But the moment my supervisor’s name escaped from me, as he turned to me and I shakily said, “my grandmother, she…” I cried. My supervisor looked shocked. “Go,” he said. I stumbled out of office on legs that just found land.
My office sat on the banks of the main river that cuts a swathe through the heart of the country, a weakened version of the pulse it once was. I’ve never once thought much of it, but as I made my way to the train station on the opposite bank, the gentle and tiny laps that the water made against barnacled stones called to me. As it was, I struggled to catch my breath, and sobs broke away from my chest like hot air balloons. I sat on the stone steps and curled into myself, seeking solace in the steady roar and hum of traffic, and the steady sound of my heartbeat crashing in me. I couldn’t handle the grief.
I have never understood the depths of grief; I could never imagine the struggle it took to avoid the tumble to the bottom. It poured out of me, steaming like the hiss of air let out from the hot air balloon - a cataclysmic reaction of hydrogen meeting oxygen.
I don’t remember how long it lasted, but I managed to compose myself after a while, and made my way to the hospice. (Puffy eyes be damned.) As I looked down at my grandmother’s sleeping face, I couldn’t help but feel cheated. That my tears were cheated out of me by a fighter. I should have had more faith in her. Yet at the same time, I wondered what she couldn’t let go of, what was it that bonded her so strongly to this earthly world that many are hoping to leave.
Looking back, it was probably a foreshadowing of how I still cannot let go of her to this day.
I only knew stock market crashes - red lines zig-zagged across the screen, moving up, down, up down incessantly like a pulse thundering ‘I’m still alive!’. Because there was never a permanent down. But within my grandmother’s flesh, stranded between parchment skin and glass bones, lie a pulse crashing down.
It was the third time that we’ve received a similar call from the hospice. By then, we had an alarm fatigue: the two previous occasions saw us instantly dropping whatever we were doing, and rushing across the island to her bedside. It wasn’t so much an Asian obligation to be by her side as she drew her last breath, as it was our desire to say our proper farewells as she slips gently into the night that would take her forever away from us. But she was a fighter, had always been. She clung on tight to life each time, prolonging her pain and suffering for yet another morning.
By the second time, I didn’t know what to feel. My bosses were taking tasks away from me, out of consideration for my situation, but I gradually resented that. I feared being eventually side-lined because of the numerous times I had to excuse myself from work just to be with her. In the next instant, I would berate myself mentally. She was the grandmother I loved so much; how could I even begin to resent her? How could I repay her love for me - her bearing the pain for so long just to wait for my return home - by being so unfilial?
So when the third call came, when I saw my mother’s name flash on my phone, not again, I thought. Such fatigue that when the words - the very tone and language in which it was said - robbed me of breath.
Until that moment, I’ve never cried in office. Tears, I believed, would make me seem weak and incompetent. Vulnerable. Battles at work could never be won by tears. But the moment my supervisor’s name escaped from me, as he turned to me and I shakily said, “my grandmother, she…” I cried. My supervisor looked shocked. “Go,” he said. I stumbled out of office on legs that just found land.
My office sat on the banks of the main river that cuts a swathe through the heart of the country, a weakened version of the pulse it once was. I’ve never once thought much of it, but as I made my way to the train station on the opposite bank, the gentle and tiny laps that the water made against barnacled stones called to me. As it was, I struggled to catch my breath, and sobs broke away from my chest like hot air balloons. I sat on the stone steps and curled into myself, seeking solace in the steady roar and hum of traffic, and the steady sound of my heartbeat crashing in me. I couldn’t handle the grief.
I have never understood the depths of grief; I could never imagine the struggle it took to avoid the tumble to the bottom. It poured out of me, steaming like the hiss of air let out from the hot air balloon - a cataclysmic reaction of hydrogen meeting oxygen.
I don’t remember how long it lasted, but I managed to compose myself after a while, and made my way to the hospice. (Puffy eyes be damned.) As I looked down at my grandmother’s sleeping face, I couldn’t help but feel cheated. That my tears were cheated out of me by a fighter. I should have had more faith in her. Yet at the same time, I wondered what she couldn’t let go of, what was it that bonded her so strongly to this earthly world that many are hoping to leave.
Looking back, it was probably a foreshadowing of how I still cannot let go of her to this day.