I got an email about two weeks ago from my parents. Once I saw the subject line, I knew that it had happened.
I've been lucky enough to grow up with two sets of healthy grandparents. My dad's parents live about three miles away-they were a big help in keeping my brother and me out of afterschool day cares back when my mom used to work. My mom's parents are back in Taiwan and used to fly over to spend summer vacation with us. All were key parts of my childhood, their lives full of stories and histories that will never be understood outside the family.
As I grew older, I began pushing them away. It began unconsciously, of course-I was just copying my brother, who, at four-and-a-half years my senior, was an idol. Then, when I finally realized the rift that had grown between us, I was too scared, too surprised to make an effort to bridge it. Language became a huge barrier. Chinese had been both my brother's and my first language because we'd grown up around our grandparents, but after that first year in school, the home videos no longer prompt internal subtitles. Chinese was awkward and heavy on my sharp tongue, and I resented the way it made me feel like someone who didn't belong.
So we drifted, drawing no further apart yet with an ocean between us. My mother's parents were pushing ninety and found the thirteen-hour trip to the States too draining. Soon all the communication I had with them were obligatory ni hao's and zai jian's on the telephone once a week. To be honest, I didn't miss them. They were tied to a childhood filled with tightly braided hair and plastic beads strung on cheap, fraying twine. I was grown up. Growing up. I didn't need that anymore. Sometimes, though, I'd come across an old Wal-Mart-developed photo from my grandfather's camera, and I'd see him crouching unashamedly in the middle of the sidewalk, holding up traffic in both directions as he took picture after picture of our uncomfortable smiles, freezing us in time.
We used to visit my dad's parents every other Saturday night. They'd come see us every other Saturday morning. My brother and I would loll around on the carpet, tossing happy-face-imprinted stress balls into the little plastic basketball hoop we had hanging off the bookshelf if we were at home, indulging in a game of handball-against-the-kitchen-counter if we were at the grandparents'. We'd get together for meals on the holidays and birthdays-usually at the same two or three Chinese restaurants around town. My grandfather's been hard of hearing for as long as I can remember, and our Asian-level shouting in his presence (and his blissful ignorance) has been a long-running Chen family joke:
Scene: Outside the Chen family home
Father (to Grandfather): Thanks for coming! Drive safely!
Gandfather (to Grandmother): Why is the mail here so early?
When my brother went off to college, I became the only child, and these visits were quieter and more uncomfortable without my brother's brash presence distracting the adults from my hopeless social inadequacy. When my brother finished college and came back home, I thought the magic would return. We had both changed too much, though, and these visits were a chore, distracting me from my writing, him from his friends. My grandparents started coming over every Saturday morning when I moved out, a fact that disturbed me for some strange reason when I went back home the first few times. Something was wrong, and I tapped furiously at my laptop as the adults conversed over my head.
My mom's been going back to Taiwan a lot more recently, partly because she doesn't need to shuttle any more children to and from school, but mostly because her parents are getting old and still live in the apartment my grandfather built when my mom was four. My grandmother, who once sprinted out the front door into the pouring rain to hand my much-detested piano teacher an umbrella, has a bad back and is slowly going blind. There's a reason our entire family wears glasses. My grandfather's well over ninety now, and he had surgery after a bad fall earlier this year. What's the worst, though, is that his mind's going. Nothing hurts my mom more than that. I'm too old now to pretend that I don't understand, that I don't worry, that I'm not calling my mom twice a week to make sure everything's going as okay as things can go. But I try.
It only seemed like a matter of time before things tipped one way or the other and everyone suddenly dies and I realize what a terrible granddaughter I've been.
All this flashed through my mind when I opened the email.
My great-aunt had always scared the hell out of me. She wore enough perfume to stun a rhinoceros, and I believed that the gold and jade bangles on her arms dated back to the Second World War (or maybe the Paleozoic Era-who knows). She was the oldest of three sisters on my dad's side, and as such, demanded great respect by her very presence. She collected large, porcelain dolls and arranged them around her flower vases. I know this because she took pictures of these arrangements and sent them to her youngest sister, my dad's mother, who then passed them on to us with no little laughter at the perplexed looks on our faces.
I last saw her two summers ago in Taiwan when we went out for a long, fairly painful lunch together. I understood about half of the conversation that took place and wished for a quick end to our time together.
She'd been sick for about a year, drifting in and out of the hospital, defiantly living on her own and denying dementia, stubbornly holding onto her independence and large, creepy porcelain dolls. Everything went downhill quite quickly in the past few months, though I only received sporadic updates when I happened to be home. About a month ago, there was talk about heart surgery.
Then I went back to school and heard nothing more until this email, which said nothing but that she'd died.
I knew it. I knew it was coming. Like a train barrelling around the corner, there was no avoiding it. I knew it was coming. I knew it. I knew it. Still, my stomach dropped. God only knew how my grandmother was dealing with this, gentle soul that she is. My mother, staunchly holding everything together and waiting for news of a funeral she hopes won't hit a little closer to home.
I was a litle sad, yes, to hear that she'd died, but I was more scared than sad. What did this mean for everyone else? I know they're all going to die, that it will most likely be soon, and that it'll tear apart the meticulously manufactured perfection of the Chen family, but I'd always held onto some distant hope that I could isolate myself from it, run away and hide at school, let relationships shrivel up and die so that I wouldn't feel anything when the actual end came.
But my creepy, somewhat neurotic great-aunt died and I realized that forgetting just wasn't possible.
I waited two weeks to write about this so I could go about it with a level head and not turn it into a piece of sentimental Good-Lord-I'll-Miss-Her-So-Much-We-Were-So-Close-She-Was-The-Best-Great-Aunt-Ever gobbledygook because that just wouldn't be true. Yeah, she was my great-aunt. Yeah, we got on alright. Yeah, she gave me lots of strange, sometimes interesting jewelry whenever I saw her, but we were never close, so I won't pretend that she meant as much to me as I would have liked. Whose fault is that? Mine and mine alone.
Death is coming at a million miles an hour, and every day I wait for a call, an email, a text from back home telling me that someone else is soon going to be pushing daisies. Mending fences is a little hard when you refuse to acknowledge that the fences even exist. Adages are easy to spit out but hard to swallow.
I just needed a sense of reassurance, some sense that my great-aunt didn't regret not knowing me as much as I regret not knowing her. I'm pretty sure that was the case. In fact, I'm pretty sure she didn't remember me at all.
That, oddly enough, is a comfort.
