Month: November 2023

I realised that I had put a lot in place before her death so that I would be OK when she died. I knew that the end was going to be catastrophic, an absolute catastrophe, and I didn’t know how to prevent it. I knew that the tidal wave was coming for me, whether I liked it or not, and that when it came, the tidal wave would be big. I had tried to look at podcasts about grief to help me heal, and all of the advice included some iteration of “keep swimming, as huge waves are going to crash and you *will* feel you are drowning.”  So I kept swimming, there was nothing else for it. And as the days get longer it starts to get better. There was a lot of water in me this year.

How many of us had to be put back together, the broken pieces? 

Lately (*thanks everyone for your grief counseling suggestion!) I watched as my therapist cried as I told her the stories of my grandmother. To watch another human cry at your words is a wonderful, wonderful thing. And so I realised that I would look in every woman for a sign of her, to replicate that relationship that I had had with her. What she really gave me was that feeling of being an outsider, of being disenfranchised, of not being accepted, because as a Malaysian in China during the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, and just being herself, she would have been ostracized. And I didn’t really get any of that when I was growing up, my family didn’t really provide a stable, safe home, but they did materially. I had been going way too fast in the past, so fast in fact I didn’t know what I had left behind. This was how it was taught to me, how to live life. I had to do so much for my family just to stay afloat, just so they would like me, and let me be a part of them. And how stabling it is to look ahead and just see death, which is the stage that I am at now. And I had to hold on to that Chinese side, in whatever way I could. I just wanted someone to be home when I got there. And this whole time I’ve had to balance the light and the dark that is within me, and in some ways, I feel as if my life stopped at seven.