Letting Go

originally posted on may 24, 2018

Before my grandmother — 嫲嫲, as I knew her — had begun to forget, she cooked.

Inside the cramped kitchen in the old apartment, she would concoct the most wonderful dishes, a textbook image of a perfect housewife. In my youth, it was a routine, a resolute variable in a distastefully changing world. With radio static and the gentle sea breeze through the open window as white noise, she would slice, steam, and boil just in time for my parents to come home. I alone knew why my grandmother did it, the cooking. I knew, all along — it was a charade, a game she played with herself. It was to remind her of a former life, as if the mere hand movements or familiar aroma of fish sauce would somehow liberate her from time and revert her to sweeter memories: the red-bricked cottage; the air of the Fukien countryside; and, of course, my grandfather.

I will never forget what 嫲嫲 told me one day as reclined on her bed, a frail figure sending ripples across a creased ashen mattress. It was one of those special moments: one that lingered without reason or forewarning; an indent on a memory; a grainy film on repeat. As if bestowing upon me a divine revelation, she placed a frail hand on my shoulder and spoke with an age-old softness. “The strongest man,” she said, “is the one that knows to let go.”

As all stories go, my grandmother eventually moved out of the apartment to a retirement home — a rustic, thronged place halfway across Hong Kong Island. This was the waning period, a conclusion to her penultimate era and beginning to the end. Perhaps it was because of this that she became an unfamiliar version of herself altogether: no longer a woman who spent her days against a backdrop of steam and seasoning, not even one who wandered by the South China seaside in the mornings or the complex’s gardens in the afternoons. No, there was none of that. After the move, all she had was a small room in an elderly home, a curtain and nothing more separating her from nurses, from afternoon mah-jongg, from the occasional visitor, from the world.

And so, a younger version of me came to know the lifeless odor of the home every Sunday afternoon. It suffused the air, this alien stench, staining the whole facility like an expired vignette. As we drove home in the dying afternoon, I’d feel the sterility still dampening my T-shirt like vomit. It was only when I stripped and scrubbed myself in the bathtub later each night that I managed to remove this infectious layer, this physical coat of chronic demise.

On better days, of which there were more as the end approached, my father would drive us to Tin Hau to take my grandmother out for the day. We would traverse the island and drive her to her special places — her 老地方. There were only a few: the congee place in Jordan; the old mall in South Horizons; the monastery in the New Territories — incidentally, where my grandfather’s ashes are kept. At these locales, she would break character and laugh, as if, even for just a fleeting moment, walking onto the cobblestoned alleys and marbled verandas of her history would allow her to access her fondest memories, sealed off today by circumstance. Again, though no one said it, I knew. I knew exactly why we did this. It was for her to escape the monotony and to relive a life long gone. We were supplying an inhaler to the victim of a terminal asthma attack.

The truly insightful are precise in picking out each flaw of a man’s life, each imperfection of the human condition. My grandmother was one such person. She could look at a face and from it locate every insecurity underneath the surface. She could hear a man speak and know exactly what secrets he held to himself. She could ask the most probing questions and know even without an answer what words would come spilling out. I know this because she raised my father, a man conditioned to defend himself against precisely such weapons, a man who drowned himself in education, in criminal law textbooks, a man who eventually became a litigator of the courts.

嫲嫲 asked me one time whether it is more painful to have forgotten that something happened or to have missed it entirely. In the end, it was she that did not have this choice. One of the final burdens of being an incredible woman, so it goes, was a precursory departure from reality — dementia. Arthritis to her mind claimed her before the other ending could.

For me, it happened in stop-motion, chunky frames disconnected from one another. It opens with my mother pulling me off the schoolbus, just as it was about to depart for home. My mother hailing a taxi and muttering an unfamiliar address. Hearing one word — the Cantonese for “hospital” — and understanding all that needed to be understood. Watching the pale blue evening fade to black through the window. A pair of high heels followed by sneakers, leaving the car and going through glass doors. Standing in a waiting room for eternity. Heart quivering slightly. Being ushered down the hall, third door on the right. Nurse pushing the door open. Walking in, slowly. Por Por and Anna in the corner, eyes darting from floor to ceiling fan to bed. Connie leaning on the windowsill beside them, legs trembling ever so gently. My brother, not there. My mother and I, both saying a few things to her. Eyes landing on dark brown marbles, hushed lips meeting a fragile smile, strained whispers greeted by silence.

And the last shot — my father, clasping a pair of delicate hands he would touch for the last time.

The news came to me in the same way it had happened: peacefully. Mami dialed me after school the next day. She asked me if I wanted sushi for dinner tonight, and I told her anything was ok. She didn’t say anything about what had happened, and from this omission I learned everything. I called Babi after. He told me he had stayed the night at the hospital and was still in the lobby filing some paperwork. He asked me how was school and what are you working on right now and I said nothing much and asked him when will you be back home for dinner? Mami wants to get sushi. We didn’t speak about it. It was a balloon aching to be popped, but all we did was let it deflate slowly on its own.

I still wonder what hell my father must have faced on the day of the funeral. It is one thing to have witnessed your mother’s lifelines dart frantically on a screen before yielding to a flat line, but it is an entirely new experience to see that same woman’s motionless, beautied corpse lying finally at rest. It was the first time I had seen him cry.

So, there it was. A woman sent off. A coffin in flames. A lifetime condensed to an urn.

—

The last time I saw 嫲嫲 was a few months later, in the late afternoon of a crisp autumn day. My father and I were in the garden, basking in the last few surges of August air. It was then that I noticed a soft azure glimmer in the evening haze, a jewel pinched out by dark green foliage. It was a butterfly.

“Butterflies aren’t supposed to be here, not at the southernmost tip of Hong Kong. No, no. That’s not a butterfly. That’s your grandmother,” Babi told me. To my wonder, he spoke with an air of conviction, half smiling. “She’s here to say farewell.”

My father was raised in superstition — he is a man with peculiar beliefs, not all of which are derived from logic or legitimacy. But, this time, I think that he may have been onto something. The butterfly was my grandmother. He believed it, I believed it, and that was all that mattered. Here was the woman we loved, visiting us for a final time. 嫲嫲 had come to say goodbye.

In time, we will all meet the same end. Whatever precedes it — a morning spent wandering along an esplanade; an afternoon hunched in a kitchen; a night wasted pretending desperately that the ceiling was the sky, that you were anywhere but here — is of little consequence. When the time comes, the passersby and the taxi driver and the nurse and Por Por and Connie and Anna and my brother and my mother and my father and you and I — we will all be gone. That is not a choice. That never was.

This is the tragedy we all share. By nature or by circumstance, we will all arrive at the same fate. How peculiar. Death — the singular doctrine we know for sure, and at the same time, the one mystery we will never know anything about.

It is useless to linger, it is useless to wait, it is useless to try resurrect a memory from an inescapable designation six feet underground. There is no tangible extinguisher or emotional narcotic that will stop the casket from going up in smoke. Though, I did realize something on that day so many years ago, as the crematorium faded to a speck on the horizon through the car’s rear window. 嫲嫲 was right. She had been right all along. If everything we love in this world must end, then the strongest thing anyone can do — the only thing, really — is let go.