Ma

A year ago today, I was having an argument with my mother in the car.  We had been straggling to the hospital in shifts and we were tired.  It was hot.  I was wearing something unbearably ratty and I hadn't had time to shower.

My father had made me go because he couldn't and after the three years of fighting, my grandfather's death six months before and the last week in SGH, it was feeling interminable for all of us.  I had barely known her before she came to live with us, and by then, she was deeply ill.

Just the day before when I had seen my grandmother, she was lucid for about five minutes.  Between the rattling breaths she was drawing over the feeding tube, she looked at me.  Her eyes wavered over my face.

"Ma," I said gently.  "Zhao An!"  It was how I greeted her every morning at home.  When she could still speak, she would say, "Zhao An!" cheerfully in reply.

At first I didn't think she had heard me.  Her eyes glazed over.  Then with an effort, she groaned around the tube.  An approximation of the tones and syllables.  "Ao Ahh."  I started to cry.  She slipped out of focus again.

In a break in our argument, my mother sighed over the steering wheel and the phone rang.  "Come quickly, Shu," my aunty said, tinny from the hospital payphone.  "She's going."

When we got there, she was dead.  My mother stood, crying silently by her bed, stroking her chest again and again and saying, "Mama."  We brushed her hair away from her yellow face.  Tied her jaw shut with a bandage.  Talked about her in hushed voices.  The other patients kept staring at the curtain round her bed.

We chose the casket.  Dressed her in black and gold brocade.  Planned the flowers.  Laughed and cried through strange Chinese descriptions of incomprehensible coffin-lifting rites.  

Just before her funeral service began, it occurred to me that Amazing Grace wasn't in the hymnbooks.  "Aren't we singing it?" I reminded my mother.  I was shocked no one had thought to ask the pastor about her favourite song.  We sang it in the end.  I couldn't make a sound.  I crumpled, hunched over the entire funeral, dripping silent tears while people gave thanks and prayed around me.  Until then, I didn't know how much I had grown to love her.

On the way to the crematorium, they put her in their fanciest car.  The speakers blasted Amazing Grace all along the highway and I thought she would have been so proud.

Four days of non-stop crying passed.  I went back to work.  We all spoke about how much of a mercy it was that she had left peacefully.  I started to think of her and my grandfather together again, in some place filled with light, beyond pain.

The thought comforts me a lot now.  That they are happy somewhere, in the way that they couldn't be in the last five years of their lives.  Walking in slow, bow-legged steps along back streets.  Reading.  Eating soft-boiled eggs.  It's a happy knowledge and I can forget that she suffered and slowly lost her mind.

Every now and then though, the one memory that catches me off-guard and undoes me is of the last time my grandmother wished me good morning.