When I thought about - and I do, in sporadic periods, throughout the day - it felt like I was merely giving excuses to myself. Like in the way people try to justify a lie by simply weighing out between the bad or the better points, and sticking to what that make them feel good, regardless. When I thought like that, and when I thought about thinking that way, I felt like I’ve probably lost a heart somewhere.
Sunday morning I woke up to pass my mom a phone call. Shortly afterwards she told me my great grandmother passed away.
The first thing that came to my mind was; this is probably the right time to cry.
But I didn’t.
I left my mom to dress and lay down on the couch. When she came out of the room I went to put my arm around her shoulder, listened to her talk and weep, not really talking back. Because I think we both know what we were going to say, and what we both really thought, so I didn‘t say a word.
Whatever I did then felt fake. Like an obligatory action. It felt like I just did it because it was right.
I felt like I was indifferent. I didn’t know if it was age, or because I knew personally that this day would come. When I was younger, when those ramifications in the night led me to question the questionings of death, I would think of my great grandmother and, reminded of her age, of her growing fragility, I would quietly weep in my dreams. Maybe I’ve wept so much in the solitude of nights and nightmares that I couldn’t weep today.
I loved my great grandmother. I might not have been closest to her, and she to I, but I loved her nonetheless.
Later I fetched the mother out for breakfast with the grandmother, to talk about the news and the immediate plans. On the way back we talked about it, and said the things we meant to say. My mother then mentioned about ‘Hei Chung’, which sounded different from what we normally call the funeral procession.
“What’s the difference?” I asked.
“It’s a celebratory procession. Where it’s considered a happy thing for one to live more than a hundred years old and passed. It’s a happy thing.”
I knew then, as I’ve always knew it, somehow, that it is true. My great grandmother was a hundred and four years old. She was witness to the coming of the millennium, and lived into its first decade. She has children that gave birth to children that gave birth to children; generations of a family that has gone to have their own. And I certainly hoped that she had lived a wonderful life, and seen all there is in the world that she needed to see.
Whether or not it’s a good life is not for me to say. But I hope for it. Living for 100 years, one is bound to have at least seen one part of a good life, no?
And I hoped, but in my heart, I already knew. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t cry.
********
I always felt that, as a writer, as a means of a parting gift there should always be a written eulogy. And I’m set to write it, only that it dawned to me eventually that I knew very little about my great grandmother.
All this time, I figure that all I knew about her is that she was old, that she was Teo Chew, thatshe was kind and caring, and that she had the greatest memory. Other than that, I knew nothing.
I just found out her name yesterday. It was Lee Hou. It was a pleasant name; in a way, it sounded like “You’re Fine.” Or “Everything’s Good.” Lee Hou. “You’re Fine.”
My earliest memory of my great grandmother were those days where I could find her in my grandmother’s house. Back then I was in primary school, and both the parents would be at work by the time school finishes. For that period, instead of taking the bus home I took a smaller bus to my grandmother’s house, where there’d be warm food to eat and aunts to terrorize. For one time, I can’t remember how long, my great grandmother moved in to live with my grandmother.
Back then great-grandma (or Ah Pak, as we call her) could still walk; she had a cane where the top handle was the painted head of an eagle, with an eye that stared out with determined ferocity. I used to think it was the eagle that helped her to walk, like she was resting her hand on a flapping eagle that took her to wherever she needed to go, its wings like a personification of a strong spirit.
If you’d had talked to her, my great-grandma, when she was in her room in Penang where we’d go visit her, she would tell you the way I used to act whenever I arrived from the school bus at my grandmother’s house. And she would do so with exact detail; something which I’ve never ceased to be amazed of. She would tell you how I liked to lie down on the floor and pedal myself about (like mopping the floor with my back, she’d say), or how I used to spend a long time during baths to play with water. Or how once she asked me something and, not knowing a single word of her dialect, I thought she called me stupid. And it wasn’t till years later when they told me she actually meant something else.
What I remember most fondly were the afternoons that we spent together. I would watch, for the thousandth time, those Disney cartoons that were kept in my grandmother’s house, and my great-grandma would exclaim, sometimes excitedly, during the climaxes, though I never knew what or how to tell her. Sometimes we’d play cards, and it was always either Blackjack or The Fishing Game, which were the only two I remember she could play.
She would move back to Penang eventually, and I’d still come home to my grandmother’s for the rest of the year until we had a maid. After that, the only time I got to see my great-grandma was in every trip down Penang with my family. It was something we did without fail. And every time she would recognise who I am, and recited the days in my grandmother’s house.
The last time I held her hand and kissed her cheek and said goodbye was December last year. That felt like a long time ago. And today, it felt like I couldn’t have ever done it enough. But that’s the way death would make you feel.
My family and relatives would tell me that my great grandmother was a strong woman, a kind woman, a caring and kindred soul. I would remember her as the one person that could always make me feel soothed, somehow, whenever I see her. Even when she was so old that she couldn’t walk, and that her hands could always seem so frail, so brittle, I would somehow feel fine. Like the eagle of the walking stick, holding her hand made me feel like I’d get somewhere. And I’d be fine.
That was her name, after all. You’re Fine.
Everything is Good.
*******
On Sunday morning, the clouds hung low and dark and heavy, and I thought that it was prophetic in the way we always make the weather to be. But in the afternoon the clouds lifted and vanished, and the sun turned the tarmac impossible to walk upon, especially on worn orange slippers, and there was this quietness in the town and in the neighbourhood that felt like how Sunday himself would spend the day.
And I went out to get the house telephone fixed, along with a haircut at a barber who was suddenly extremely meticulous . The brother cooked Pasta ala Carbonara for a friend, and I got to eat some (it tasted like Carbonara, only that it dried up a little too quickly to enjoy). I squeezed some Final Fantasy in between chores. And I did something that involved gloves and a drainage pipe, which I would hope to forget soon enough.
Come dinner, and a trip to the Pasar Malam for it, it felt completely like any given Sunday.
In some ways I thought I could hate myself for it, but I didn’t. There was one thing that we all understood that day.
Tomorrow we’ll be heading down for the funeral. We’ll get to see her for the last time, and walk with the last with her. Life, after that, goes on.
And it keeps going.
