Entry 000084; 01.05.01

There really isn't any way to start. I think that if I wanted to say all I had to say in my journal, it wouldn't really work. When I'm ready, maybe I'll turn it into a story, a eulogy of sorts in its own kind. For now, I suppose I'll just blurt out stuff as it comes.

My clothes wreak of incense and the sick sorrow smell of my grandparent's apartment. It's a smell I never want to smell again, it's the smell I will forever associate with the sickness of my grandparents, impending death, and the scray, orange-porous growth on the top of my YeYe's scalp. This isn't the sharp smell that I would think to associate with sorrow; nor is it the watery copper smell of blood or the medinicinal smell of alcohol or even tiger balm. The last two days I spent waiting and waiting for the smell of tiger balm to take the wind, to comfort me. Tiger balm is the smell of my grandmother. It never came. This is a blessing in a way - I won't associate it with her death, only her life. I'll associate it with her smiling face and her warm enveloping hug. I'll associate it with her small, happy voice "yo mummy, she goo?"

The worst fear I have is that I will forget her voice. Her tone and her accent and the quick way she spouted language.

I've never seen my YeYe cry before. I've never seen him show any real emotion. He shies off hugs because he doesn't want to seem un-manly. He doens't smile for pictures, he remains stiocally macho at all times. Yesterday afternoon when I walked into his apartment, he was sitting in his usualy plastic lawn chair in his living room, sobbing, and waving his arms in what looked like a physical attempt to cast off the pain of my grandmother's death. My grandfather looks about ten years older than the last time i saw him, just a few months ago. His hair was unwashed and tossled, a large growth, porous and orange has taken place on his scalp and it scares and disgusts me. Why do wierd things like that have to be on my grandparents? On the people I love? His thin frame was bent over, hunched even farther than his usual angle. I can still hear him sobbing.

Half of my tears are sponsored by the selfish loss of my grandmother. I miss her and I am upset that I will never see her again in this life. The other half, they remain for my Ye Ye. Men weren't made to outlive thier wives. They just aren't, and I don't think they are made to handle sorrow the way women are.

I always knew as a chinese man, my Ye Ye never treated my grandmother with the utmost respect. I sort of always held a grudge against him, for having a second wife (and leaving her behind), for leaving my grandmother to carry home groceries and refusing to give her a ride (according to my mother), and for whatever else a man may do to his wife in the Chinese culture. I understand that is the way they lived, and he was still a good man through those things because he didn't know any better, but I still held a grudge.

Any negative feelings I may have harbored against my YeYe (and they were small, almost subliminal things I coudln't control else I would have) were obliterated when I heard his sobs of grief, saw his thin arms waving in the air as if to ward off the bad days. For my YeYe to mourn so publically, he must have loved my grandmother greatly.

This is all written so badly; my grandmother really deserves more but I've just been so stretched out this week, this really is the best I can do for now.

My YeYe is a good man for his time. He worked hard and brought his family to America to be sucessful and happy, free of racism (one of the main reasons they left Malaysia). My uncles and my father are all very good men, responsible sons and fathers (especially my father, who has been spending his every free moment taking care of my grandmother and YeYe), and my aunt(s) too are good women. By my grandmother, she was a great woman for her time. She was the most open-minded, unbiased, jolly woman in the world. She accepted my mother with open arms, she loved me regardless of race, and she taught her children and her grandchildren to be loving and responsible. All of her children grew up to be sucessful. If there is any way to portray her sucess, I think all you would really have to do is look at her four granddaughters as we sat in a huddle of clasping arms and tear-stained faces, sobbing and sobbing and sobbing, taking comfort in each other's arms. I have never seen a chinese family so open to each other and emotionally supporting. I've never seen a family grasp for each other as such. True, we are ourselves Americanized, but we are still Chinese, and we are still a Chinese family. Yet the nature of our grief and consolation towards each other reflected in every way my Grandmother's loving nature. She is the only Chinese person (aside from my dad, who learned from her) who would greet you with the biggest, most suffocating hug when you walked in the door. She was the most loving woman I've ever known, and the fact that she was even though she was raised in a strictly coldly-emotional culture also reflects...just how amazing she was.

When I was little, shorter than her (that must have been pretty damn little..she was 4 foot something when she passed away), She would tackle me in a warm, tiger balm hug as soon as I got two feet into the door. She would crush my head into her grandmother-like bosom and smell the top of my head until I struggled for air. I never really understood when I was little why she did that - hugging me so thouroughly and smelling me as if to fill her lungs - until I found my old set of children to adore and love.

This is probably the easiest way she could possibly have done anything, and it's almost too convienient to think she didn't do it on purpose. Not only did she pass away quietly, in her sleep as she had hoped, but she did it while all her grandchildren were on vacation. This was the best possible time because she didn't cause our most extreme period of sorrow to interfere with work and all that (I don't think I would have been able to go to school if this had happened over a schoolweek-I would have sat in bed curled up in a ball). You have to love a woman who does everything like that. She waited until after Christmas, she waited until she was fairly old, and we were all pretty much grown.

Really, I don't think there is any way to describe my grandmother, and what she meant to me. She has always been one of the most powerful, god-like women I've known. Her presence was like a small, compact polyester ball of tiger balm smells and big warm soft hugs. She was the best hugger I've ever known. She survived poverty, these Chinese culture's attitude towards women, five children, a heart attack, and goodness knows what else.

The funeral itself went well. The chinese are smart - you have to give them that, and they busy the hands of the mourning family by folding paper silver and gold bouillion to burn, incense to burn, paper money to burn, everything to send to her next life. It makes you feel like you are doing something for her, and that makes you feel a lot better.

I mostly cried enough to give myself a splitting migrain the first day. The second day I slowed it down to a slow leak. I found a mild humor in my cousin Steve's insistance on taking pictures. Who would want pictures of gramma's funereal? Would you put it in the photoalbum to dwell over, as you would wedding pictures to remeber fondly? It all seemed ridiculous. I was happy though, knowing that through all this, gramma would be sitting there laughing, probably thinking the same thing as I. More importantly, she'd know what all of us were saying, even the english speaking grandkids, and for once I can communicate with her (if a little one-sidedly) without the stubborn barrier of language.

Imagine my anger, that small, dull, illogical flash as they loaded my little gramma into the back of a hearse. That's no place for her! I wanted to yell at them(?) anyone, that's no place for her, in a cold box in the back of an ugly black car. She belongs on the old red sofa with the soft velour fabric and the deep cousions, sitting in the loveseat bathed in warm lamplight, holding a hot chocolate, wearing slippers. Another flash of anger came when they lowered her grave to the ground. Imagine, the anger! That's no place for my little gramma. No place at all.

And finally, finally I feel a little better knowing that there is someone in...wherever people go when they die... to take care of Marcus. How happy she'll be, to have a grandchild to take care of and to hug and smell over there!! She was the one who was the most upset when he died, and she was the one who cried the hardest, and for that alone I could love her forever.

30/68