Hello, Tim!
I have a story to tell. One I think that people don’t talk about very often.
Yesterday was a normal, chilly morning for Taiwan. There were small raindrops from the sky, but it didn’t stop me from heading out of the house along with my mother, who had to be at the convenience by seven o’clock. After seeing her zoom off into the distance on her electronic motorbike, I went the opposite direction, crossed the streets, and into the big park to exercise.
I jogged until my legs were worn out, and I headed home. Only at the door did it come to me that I had left my keys at home. I trekked all the way to my mom’s workplace for her keys; I just crashed on the sofa immediately.
It was lunchtime. I entertained myself by cooking a meal. It was splendid. I had barely gulped down the last spoon of soup when I got a phone call from my aunt.
My grandfather was dying.
The sobbing and wavering tones on the other side of the phone indicated that my aunt was weeping. I tried to stay calm, and my aunt told me to go over as soon as possible. “Be quick, he’s not going to stay for long...” she said.
There stands a rather long distance between the hospital and my house, so the steady but slow MRT wouldn’t suffice. By the road, I flagged down a taxicab, knowing that the money I had brought along would be ample to pay for the fee. The driver asked why I was in such a hurry, and I told him vaguely that my grandfather was ‘seriously ill.’ He then engaged me in several hearty conversations, but I could focus on that.
When I arrived, Grandpa was already gone.
His eyes were closed and his mouth agape. What pinkish color in his face that indicated life had already drained away and was replaced with a waxy yellow. In the aged lighting in the ED, his face was expressionless as if nothing could rouse him anymore. Tears fell from my grandma’s eyes as she lifted my grandfather’s face, weeping. Desperate but in vain, she held his chin, asking him to hold it to look more handsome. Don’t worry about us, don’t worry about me, she said. Go with the Buddha and live a wealthy life in the other world.
My aunt and even the maid hired to take care of my grandparents were crying. I held his hand, now without any remaining temperature. His hands were incredibly soft as per usual, which is a result of several decades of labor-free life — tears threatened, but they just wouldn’t fall. Mom was still at work at the moment, and there was no way we could reach her then. The people of the hospital came and informed us that they had to move the body from the ED to the mortuary. Requested by the people tending to the business, I helped grab the waistband of my grandpa and helped him onto the white plastic duffel bag. Before the zippers were zipped up, they draped another layer of silky cloth that had a shade of chamomile. On the all-covering blanket were symbols of Buddhism, laid upon the dead as a part of the tradition.
Whenever a turn is made, whenever we passed a door, my aunt and my grandma, along with the undertakers would utter a brisk “We are making a turn/ passing a door” which I later learned to follow suit. It must also be a part of the ritual.
It was much easier to talk about death in fictional works or on the media… The people were far from an acquaintance, and hence you will not feel the blow in your stomach when you heard that they had passed. A relative… It is different.
More relatives arrived, and they all filed into the office to arrange the funeral business. I sat alone in the breezy air-conditioned mortuary – I then registered that I had left the house in my indoor outfit: a casually thin shirt and a pair of red shorts. My trainers were worn without socks, and the discomfort kept reminding me of the fact. I sat at one of the stools in the room, barely minding the cool air hitting my skin. I was alone with my grandpa. It was a lot more serene than I thought, being in contact with a dead person. Maybe it was because of the fact that the person in front of me was my grandpa, and there was nothing I needed to be afraid of. I tried recalling the last holiday I spent at my grandparent’s place, with my grandpa still present. At a staggering age of 95, Grandpa could do nothing more than lie in bed or at most, walk a step or two to the wheelchair. The interaction between him and I would only be a greeting at arrival, a warm hug, and some cozy, family version of staring contest, and a similar greeting done before leaving. There wasn’t once in my memory, that I had seen him look at us with happy, caring eyes that needed no words of exchange. I vaguely remembered a picture found in one of my cabinets, a picture of him holding me in infanthood by both hands, steadying me as I walked. Of course, I had no recollection of this trip, but those are, however, unfortunately, one of the few interactions I had with him when I was a kid.
A ritual performer came, followed by all the present relatives. With two palms making contact, we prayed as the man started to chant the words from a Buddhist hymn. He held a bell in his hand, jingling it in tempo with the chanting. In the small cubic and reclusive room, the bell chimed, resonating our eardrums from both sides. I know it wasn’t the prime purpose, but I believe that the bell had an effect on us, calming us down as it sang its soothing monotone.
Mom rushed in. She got my message and left the moment she could and headed right over to the hospital. Amid whimpers of remorse, I heard her say that she was sorry that she was late. Seeing her beating herself up was like having glass shards pressed into me, breaking skin and into the veins. I held her as we listened to the music with no melody. She called Dad, and he was torn as well. He just got on the ship and couldn’t leave right away. Their solution was to put the phone on speaker as Mom held the phone near Grandpa’s body while Dad spoke his regretting apologies with tears in his voice. All this was overwhelming, and a bitterness rose in my nose as I took in the reality.
This is all I can offer for this week. Surely, there should be more than just this, but after the news, nothing else seems critical or appropriate of bringing up. Next week would be another big ritual, which marks the seventh day of death, a rather important ritual in the Chinese culture.
All I wanted to say now is that every day, dozens of thousands die, moving on to the last phase of their current life. You know the numbers, the statistics many of us like to analyze. You might get from the statistics the probabilities on death for tomorrow and the day after, but you can never be sure. It could be you, it could be us. It could be someone you love dearly or someone you couldn’t care less about. It could be a person who makes your reality possible or someone who had once torn your life to pieces. It could be any of us. We cannot complain or fight against it as much as we can demand Time to slow down its pace. Death happens, and it is something every living being needs to process. There is a school, a belief whose principle is to view life and death as an equal entity. Only until this Saturday had I realized how much nonsense this principle is. Death is to remind us that we who are still blinking, still talking, still reading, are alive. Seeing it with our naked eyes without any form of veil draping across is help us understand that we are not beings with infinite time. We love, we hate, we walk, we swim. But we live all the same.
.
Outside, the sunset shone the color of a yellowish color of a chamomile, like the color of the cloth covered over my grandfather.
Hugo
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