tok yang

my grandma passed away on friday.

i went to visit her on thursday and she was already on life support. do you know the sound a life support machine makes? it was the same i sound i had heard on the phone for 5 days while my mom was in a coma.

it's a sound i will never forget.

anyway, for tok yang, she was 93, she had lived a full life, all her kids came back and she passed away peacefully in her own home like she always wished.

al-fatihah.

i hadn't been back to pontian in years. this was my mom's hometown. we used to come back here for raya and all sorts of family events where my mom was the most kecoh person of all. she would show me where she had a beca accident when she was in form 1 and my grandfather carried her all the way to the hospital while everyone in the kampung saw all the blood and pronounced her dead.

i went to school there when i was 12.

the last years before my mom passed away she had a falling out with her sisters, and our family kind of drifted away a little.

after my mom passed away and my dad remarried, i lost touch totally with my mom's family. it feels sad.

my aunts always mean well but i think i'm still a little mad about some things. and with older people, i can never speak out. one of my aunt sat me down to talk about how i've lost my way.

it pissed me off at first because, well. she makes a lot of assumptions and i just get riled up in principle when people are freaking righteous. but on the whole, can't really blame her because - it's true.

you can get defensive and focus on what other ppl are wrong about but well, can you say you were right all along? you can't now, can you?

and when you're grown up, you can't blame anyone. for anything. you can't blame your parents, you can't blame your mom, you can't blame family.

you are accountable for your own actions and if you didn't like anything or didn't agree you have to power to change things.

family kills me. seriously. it's so screwed up that i never used to identify with anyone. seriously are we all from the same family? then i grew older and i start recognizing the same nutty-ness in myself.

i can't continue living like this. cutting myself off from everybody. my aunt was right, my mother would cry if she saw me now.

i was late to the funeral, so i was the last person to kiss my grandma right before they lowered her into the ground. it's the same as with the life support machine. i missed it all. i didn't get to see my mother in the hospital, fighting every breath while the machine goes beep, beep, beep. and i never saw them put her body into a markless grave on the desert.

there is grief where you look ok and you sound ok right after it happens. nobody actual knows that you never recover. you're still stuck somewhere and you never move on.

so even though they drive me crazy, i should make an effort. it's what my mom would have wanted.