A season for dying

September 6, 2005, 8:59am: SINGAPORE

Mum and Dad have just left this morning for London, where they will rent a car and drive down to Hove, near Brighton, joining my father’s four remaining siblings to bid farewell to the eldest of the flock. Lee Soo Bee, at age 71, has passed from earthly mezzo-soprano glory to godly glory, and as they mourn I celebrate a life so fully and adamantly lived.

It is the season for dying.

Or isn’t it always?

149 perish in an airplane crash in Medan. Thousands to tragic completion in the Southern Gulf. My grandfather, at last, at age 102.

This is what I see in the eyes of the grieving: the strain of self-control, redness, soreness, weeping capillaries which shed blood in order to not shed tears—-the internal negotiation of memory, guilt, propriety, and presence. Let the first to convulse be the nearest to the deceased, and the rest shall follow.

I hug Daddy in the swimming pool where we are trying to get him on a regimen to lose 30 pounds in three months. His cardiologist says he is on the borderline of having artery blockage. We’ve only completed six laps when Mum comes over with the news about Soo Bee, 13 years my father’s senior. My father is not an emotional man, but I see again the reddening corneal struggle that signals a growing and multilayered realization of loss, history, and of one’s own mortality. The struggle too is in placing the tenderness of the first above the fear of the last. Perhaps it is the middle, then, that mediates, the calmness of remembrance that is the still eye of the storm.

I was asked by my cousins to speak on behalf of the grandchildren at the second night of O-pa’s wake. The podium was not opened as it was on the previous night to unplanned eulogies, however, and we had to be satisfied with the ritual and characteristic restraint of a Methodist service. I was maddened by the impersonality of this farewell. Yet I was also overwhelmed by the intensity of our collective emotion as a family, and so maybe it was a good thing that I wasn’t called to the occasion. I think O-pa himself would probably have preferred it this way, as he was a man of staunch discipline and rigid, though loving, religion.


Here is what I might have said:

I am the seventh of my O-pa’s nine grandchildren. The first of his great-grand-children will be born in the next sixth months. He was 79 years old when I was born.

For us to know him so late in his life meant that we knew him as both legend and living. We knew that he was a teacher, principal, and father that commanded great respect. He was authoritative not only by his liberal use of the cane, but by demonstration of his own life that was led by disciplined commitment to God and family. He used to run a mile a day. He wouldn’t allow anyone to miss the nightly family meal. He would literally call every church in Singapore, searching, if one of the grandchildren in his custody didn’t come home right after Sunday service (sorry, O-pa!).

Yet to me, the greatest legacy he leaves is of his love. He was always a man of moderation, which made his excesses all the more meaningful. The unrelenting persistence of his courtship of my grandmother, for example, resulting in a 64-year-marriage. His sending away of his pregnant wife to the safety of Indonesia at the onset of the Second World War. The extravagant purchase of bridal jewelry for the wedding of his only daughter, my mother. The purchasing of his first family home under my grandmother’s name – a fact she did not know until she had to sign to sell it years later.

I relish all these stories as relics of a past that I, being born in modern Singapore, cannot touch. But there are more recent examples of his colonial mannerisms and humor that gave me a sense of him as a historical figure in real time. I recall the time he once described to me an upset of the stomach as, “a revolution in my tummy,” or how he would sometimes pronounce the end of his meal by clinking his spoon rapidly against his glass—-a schoolmaster even in the home. And he still had his standards of appropriate behaviour in his later years, for the raucousness of the family’s post-meal banter would often cause him to throw up his hands in displeasure, shaking his head declaring, “Enough! Enough!”

This was the O-pa I loved—-a living monument to history, integrity, and devotion. Yes, O-pa was ...monumental (at just over five feet). I thank him for living so long, for enduring the suffering of old age and the indignity of infirmity, because in doing so he grounded us in a sense of identity tied to ourselves as family and to our country that no government program, no textbook can give. For his life of faith I am always grateful.

O-ma turns 87 today. Usually jocular and casual, O-ma looks genuinely touched as my mother surprises her last night to wish her a happy birthday. She has, as my mother later notes, “begun to feel it.” She took little time to move her bed back into the master bedroom, where O-pa and his nurse used to stay, and to hire painters to redo the apartment. But now, in the dim desk lamp glow of the 13th evening after his passing, O-ma looks needy. I wish I could stay longer. I’ve always wished I could stay longer, while I continued to stay away. She still keeps a landscape photograph I sent her in 1998 on her dresser. She is staring at it meditatively when we walk into her room. It’s way past dinner – she’s already taken out her teeth. A sarong is wrapped tightly around her waist and loose button down shirt. I will visit her today for lunch, which I know makes her happy because I like listening to her talk, and I always finish my plate. She will complain about the misery of her diet, as her kidneys can’t sustain the intake of oils and fats of regular Singapore fare, and her diabetes won’t allow her much more than a few pieces of fruit for dessert. But her eyes will squint mischievously when she will steal something from my serving, and we will laugh and argue over her philosophies about love and other maladies.

I can’t wait to come home. Can she?