a contemplation on death and a quick update
how many people die in a year?
we visited my a-ma on may 1st, a day before her birthday. while waiting for my dad to finish placing the flowers by her vault, i looked around the room. it seemed so empty, yet so full at the same time. everyone in her room was old, unsurprisingly.
when we went to the temple to visit my taima and taikong1, i looked around again. just on the column that housed my great grandparents was the resting place of what seemed like a young child.
the slot is packed with calico critters and a lone sonny angel, sugary sweet snacks and drinks and a cute candle. in another slot, cigarettes and a can of coke. further down the temple, in slot L-28: baby formula and a bottle, alongside a new pink onesie. the name on the slot is yellowed. the baby has been here a while. two slots above it, another young child. his picture is taped to his vault, cheeky chinese kid smiling. his family always leaves an offering of candy.
unlike the columbarium that houses my a-ma, this one is packed full of people. there are barely any vaults with no one inside it.
three years ago, on my a-pe’s2 birthday, my a-ma died.
it was the first time i saw my dad cry and the first time i’d come in contact with the death of a loved one in almost a decade.
the grief isn’t harsh anymore. it is not a stinging welt on my chest, unlike the way it was when i was 21.
it’s been very hot recently. too hot to nurture life.
the chicks of the second set of birds to nest in my garden died. my dad checked on them every other morning. two weeks ago, he told me they died. he wrapped them in tissue and plastic.
“their feathers haven’t grown in,” he said, shaking his head.
i was distraught. i had been so happy when i found that there were a new pair of birds in the nest that the first ones built. how beautiful it was, that a family of yellow vented bulbuls found refuge in an empty nest. alas, the heat was too much for them. dad said the parents probably knew, since they never came back after he’d found that they’d died.
april hasn’t been kind to me. i spent a lot of days simply lying in bed, trying to sleep and run away from my worries. each waking hour, i’d spend trying not to think of anything at all. as a result, i buried myself in disco elysium and manga, running and running and running away from the grief that hangs over me like a burial shroud, pretending that it didn’t exist.
i haven’t felt like reading any of my current reads (sweet bean paste and dragonlance), so i picked up an old, unfinished book. banana heart summer by merlinda bobis. i wish to share an excerpt—or page, rather, that i quite enjoyed.
how to shred a heart?
it must be the right heart, it must be the soft core of the right heart, it must be the yellowish part of the soft core of the right heart. it is this that must be thinly sliced, or shredded if you will, then crushed to let the water out, to bleed it. but how do you flavor a shredded heart? how do you get the pitch right? with a bit of dried fish, a bit of shrimp paste, a little bit of red chilli, a bit of garlic, a bit of onion and the milk of one or two mature coconuts. a bit of, just right, not too much, enough to induce that perfect chemistry on the palate. but how can you tell or taste the perfect chemistry? when you desire a second heloung before you have even finished your first. when the second helping inspires a third. when you don’t get the shits after too much inspiration.
so, close to midnight, when the heart is sweet with herbs and spices, it bows from its stem. wait for its first dew. it will drop like a gem. catch it with your tongue. when you eat the heart of the matter, you’ll never get the shits again—ay, yes, that’s more like it. much later, this state of affairs was revealed to me with unequivocal conviction, or more specifically to my stomach, or to my own heart, or maybe to the space between the stomach and the heart which often suffers that condition called heartburn.
i think about this page a lot, and how entrancing merlinda bobis’ writing can be; how the how-tos of cooking and the description of food can parallel an emotion.
when i was younger, i wanted to publish a book. i still do, deep down. in my fantasies, i am never a chief officer or a project manager, i am always a writer. i am always an author, even though i’ve half given up on that dream—even though the realities of being an adult has disheartened the poor dreamer in me.
i stopped writing my half-baked novels in june 2021. i had a draft whose working title was a hundred shades of blue. it was the story of mari who struggled with her grandmother’s death. i began writing it to cope with my a-ma’s death, but the emotions were too much, so i had to stop for a while. the night i felt like writing again, i wrote a few paragraphs or pages, i can’t really remember.
the morning after, my mom woke me up.
“say goodbye to grandma. it’s for real this time. kiss her and sit with her.”
i thought that i had called it upon her—that i called death to take her because i had written about a girl named mari whose grandma had just died.
i can’t bring myself to open the draft even today. whose death will i write in the stars next? even if it had been a coincidence, it scares me still.
how mighty the pen is and how heavy the burden that rests against my heart.
perhaps one day, when the memory no longer haunts me, i can continue to write the story. it seems doubtful, but one never knows. perhaps by then, i’d have prepared and seasoned the heart of the matter in such a way that it will no longer give me the shits. for now, it collects dust in my hall of drafts, where all my unfinished stories have a strikingly similar theme: a girl and her grandmother.
people call me a papa’s girl, but i think i have always been grandma and grandpa’s girl deep down.
ੈ✩‧₊˚༺☆༻ੈ✩‧₊˚ੈ✩‧₊˚༺☆༻ੈ✩‧₊˚ੈ✩‧₊˚༺☆༻ੈ✩‧₊˚ੈ✩‧₊˚༺☆༻ੈ✩‧₊˚ੈ✩‧₊˚༺☆༻ੈ✩‧₊˚ੈ✩‧₊˚༺☆༻ੈ✩‧₊˚
a song, as always.
✮ ⋆ ˚｡𖦹 ⋆｡°✩
grandma, do you still need medicine in heaven? i don't think my texts will reach you there.
a-ma, are you still in pain? i can't hug you from down here.