My grandmother

I got the news while checking my voice mail in one of those lifestyle stores. The message from my mother left no room for misinterpretation: "Your grandmother has died." My grandmother popped up in my mind then disappeared. My consciousness expanded to the clothing racks around me, the warehouse conversion, the neighbourhood then rewrote my entire world, a new world without my grandmother's presence.

I am embarrassed to admit that the tears I cry are for myself and not for my grandmother. In the last few years, she has suffered the loss of her once robust health. Hooked up to a dialysis machine twice a day, depending on a cane or walker, experiencing pain in her hands and feet, and repeat emergency visits to the hospital had robbed her of the independence that she valued.

Yet, she was a credit to her generation, the one that survived bombings from the Japanese with young children in tow. She never complained when her world became confined to the four walls of her apartment, the fourth wall made up of boxes of dialysis supplies. Her mind remained curious and her tongue sharp. She laughed at her troubles with exasperation.

So, you see, I cry because I will miss her. The woman who used to ram me into the wall in order to win a foot race to her apartment is long gone, but other losses are more keenly felt. The sight of her curly white head in the back passenger seat of my parents' car, which preceded the playfully sarcastic greeting, "How kind of you to have lunch with me!" to which I would always respond, "That's the kind of person I am." Our shared fascination with how fat my cousin, her granddaughter, had become. "Your cousin, she doesn't like to move but she likes to eat," was her blunt assessment. Her ability to speak to anyone in the limited English that she had learned in her 60s, though she chose to mock my husband in her fluent Cantonese, "You have no idea what I'm saying, do you? I could insult you and you wouldn't even know" to which my husband would nod agreeably. She gave the impression that old age was something to look forward to because you could get away with so much.

I will cry a bit more, especially during the funeral, then I will carry on because it will honour my grandmother's lifelong resilience. My grandmother was rather unsentimental about death, announcing the passing of a friend or relative with her singular use of the English word 'ended'. In that vein, I end my public display of grief here.

Yeuk Lan Chiang

1919-2010