Two Years

Today marks two years since my grandmother's passing... but it doesn't really feel like she has been gone for two years. The memories of her are still so fresh in my mind that it feels like she has only gone for a super prolonged vacation or something.

I had two grandmas, once upon a time. The other grandma was the Silent Grandma, because she rarely spoke... I'm not sure what kind of illness she had but sometimes she'd be super alert and talkative, sometimes she'd sleep for the entire day. She passed when I was in 5th grade. And this grandma, I called her the TV Grandma, because she was always sitting in the living room, feet propped up on the coffee table, watching TV. Occasionally she'd get up and walk to the kitchen to get an apple or orange (or both) but she'd always sit right back down on her sofa. I remember there was a huge slump on where she sat.... (my parents got rid of the sofa not too long after she died)

It has been two years and I can still envision her face in my mind, her lil' wart next to her nose, I can still remember the little hairband she had in her hair that she "borrowed" from my mom many years ago... I can still remember what her voice sounded like, I can still remember her low chuckles and hysterical laughter at the TV, I can still remember the sound of her lighting the incense, I can still remember her "HALLO?" whenever she answered the phone, I can still remember the sound of the pit-patting of her slippers whenever she went to get some fruit, or whenever she went to stick incense candles around the house (which was two times per day)...

It was really quiet in the house after she left.

She was the figure that had remained constant throughout the entire 14 years of my life at that point. Then, one day, I see her on the floor with a bunch of paramedics around her trying to get her heart beating again, and then, a few days later on March 19, 2012, I see her taken off life-support. She was gone just in a matter of a week, with no prior warning. I was completely thrown off balance. Everything happened too quickly for me to take in properly.

As an only child of the house, I had never felt so alone. I hid under my bedsheets and cried myself to sleep quite a few times after she passed away, because the loneliness I felt within me was too overbearing... it was swallowing me whole. But I didn't want to tell my parents (and I still haven't); I was embarrassed that I felt lonely. Whenever I got home from school, I could still hear the TV murmuring from outside the door before I opened it, even when I knew the TV wasn't even on. I wanted to hear those murmurs again. But you know, they never came back.

My grandma (who had slight amnesia) would always ask me what grade I was in, and she'd always reply, "Ah, so close to high school." She went by the Asian school system, so in 9th grade, I was technically still in junior high in her terms. So she'd say, "Ah, so close to high school." It's kind of sad to think that I'd never be able to tell her that I finally had reached "high school"... and that I'd be graduating in a year from now...

She loved tofu pudding... she'd
always get it when we'd go eat dim sum

But anyway, miss you, grandma. Hope you've been having a nice time up there~ In the book I'm reading, The Lovely Bones, the author writes that everyone who dies has his own personal, customized heaven shaped by what the person liked when s/he was alive, or by what s/he wishes for. I bet my grandma has tons of 豆腐花, tofu pudding, in her heaven.... and the air probably smells like apples and oranges....