My dad got a call from my mother today, who is in China. I don’t know her age. I don’t think she was quite 70. So I spend today writing my university application letter and rushing off to the university to send it and coming back home and drawing and playing with my guinea pig and listening to music without knowing that my laolao was dead.
She went to the hospital less than 6 months ago with pains in her side that turned out to be a gallstone, but while they were looking at it they found a tumour right next to her kidney that had just been sitting there quietly growing. By then it was inoperable, having fused itself to her renal artery. She spent the rest of her life in hospital, just living in the craphole regional hospital for $1000 a day where my mother killed 64 mosquitos in a night while staying with her, because the flyscreen in the window wouldn’t shut completely and the nurses packed up and left after giving her an enema, leaving her stewing in her own shit juices and this is what I heard my mother tell my father with me listening through the wall because I was in the middle of my TEEs and she didn’t want to upset me yeah sorry if this is a little graphic, and I just do NOT understand why she chose to stay there instead of the bigger and better-equipped hospital like 2km away that was originally recommended to her, which would have been cheaper too since her department would have paid for that hospital and not the hole she went to instead. So that was her life the last 6 months, just living in hospital and never going home even after it became obvious she was dying because I know her and that’s just the way she was. She was not the kind of person who could just accept death and die peacefully, she was afraid and the doctors saw her fear and came hovering over her bed right up to her death with CT scans and glucose drips and one useless treatment after another because they knew she’d take anything they gave her, that’ll be another $300 please. And my grandfather and mother who is a doctor could see through this and tried to tell her you know, none of this is going to do anything but she couldn’t let it go and when someone is dying, you can’t exactly put your foot down and say no, you know?
So she leaves behind us three, which would be her daughter, my mother and our family, and them three, being her son and his family, and her husband who has plenty of health problems of his own. She was the one who cooked for all eight of us every night when we stayed with her and was the primary carer of my 12-year-old cousin because his parents were too busy for something as mundane as child-rearing. We don’t go back to visit them often, maybe once every four years and so this is the image I still have of our family and I don’t suppose it’ll update itself until I go back again.
And I think now of my other grandma my nainai, who was diagnosed with stomach cancer 4 years ago which spread to her liver and the tumour there was also inoperable. The last time we went back to China 3 years ago it was mainly to see her again because at that point we were fairly sure she did not have much longer left to live. And I thought to myself then how quickly life changed and tried to imagine my next trip back because by then I was sure my nainai would be dead and I’d have not only taken my TEEs but have finished my first year of university. As a 14-year-old this second point was just as unimaginable as the first. As it happened my nainai had a procedure to cut off all blood supply to the tumour in her liver and 4 years later she’s still going strong with no signs of recurrence, and I’ve finished my TEEs and university doesn’t seem like quite the big deal it used to be. But the one thing I never considered even once during that stay in China was that it was my other grandma, my favourite grandma who I’d never see alive again. And man, four years is a long time to be separated from someone and when you say goodbye to someone you know you won’t be seeing again for that long, even if you DO fully intend to meet again you still don’t exactly give a lot of thought to your reunion because it’s FOUR YEARS, man, that just wouldn’t make any sense. So here’s the final thing: after putting her out of my mind for 3 years her death seems like almost a non-issue and I’m crying as I type this but it’s still not sinking in.
