black tea
Dreamed about family again, 1 year and a half without any in-person interactions with any of my family members. I can’t even imagine what it would be like if next summer, unfortunately, I could not go back. Then I’ll have to wait until next lunar new year(Well, 2019 lunar new year), during when I can take a vocation of around 1 month. Then I’ll have to come back again. There will only be winter in my hometown. It’s a sad thing, considering how much I love spring and summer there.
We were planning for a trip next summer, the family trip. We need this, my family needs this. We haven’t been able to do it since I was in middle school. I remember we went to Beijing traveling after I finished my elementary school, then 2 years later, my grandpa had a stroke. Or should I say, starting to have strokes? He had 3 in total. The first one got him right side paralyzed, lost the capability of clear speech. But his mind was clear, he can write with his left hand, sometimes we couldn’t figure out what he’s saying(murmuring), we’d give him a small notebook and an ink pen and let him try to write down what he wanted. The second one is much more severe, it was not long after the first one, after which we were all expecting him to a full recovery. Okay maybe not full but 80% or 90%. It was one day morning we were in the living room and my mom was feeding him noodles as breakfast, suddenly he had a seizure and not responding at all. We called an ambulance. He stayed in the hospital for a very long time, got into ICU, we prepared so many things after he got out, thinking this could be the moment since the doc said it’s not good, he got in again. And got out finally. I cried during this period mostly. Because it’s really there, the feeling of him passing away. The second stroke was the line and boundary of his clear mind, deep inside me, I do think, yes, today, I do think he passed away after the second one, 80% of him, if the mind and the conscious is separable, because he sometimes can become super clear about who we are around him after the third stroke. I’ll come to the third one.
It was the second one which took and consumed almost all my grief. It was this one that made me rewind everything we experienced together. My whole childhood, he’s involved heavily. His passing away made itself buried deep somewhere in my head.
To be continued.
Continued on Sep 30, 2018. 16:12:28
My cousin sister just messaged me on WeChat yesterday about how she dreamt about grandpa the night before. She dreamt about him hugging her, then she cries, heavily, so intense that the moment she hugged him she can’t control her emotions and got waken up. And still immersed with the emotions.
As I’ve mentioned earlier, he’s not just involved with my childhood, my cousin’s too. My cousin and I have been very close. We’re like his two little angels with me being the naughty and run-around one. I don’t have a clear memory of when I started sleeping with him, I think when I was very young and my parents were trying to make me more independent of them, so it was my grandpa who took me to bed every single night. Our house had 3 stories and my grandpa’s room was on the 2nd floor, our living room and my parents’ bedroom were on the 3rd floor. Around 9 PM school nights, my grandpa would just come upstairs and remind me the time to sleep. I still remember how I jumped the stairs down, how those handrails on the stair are constructed so I can climb up and down to avoid the end of the stairs. There wasn’t light, I was afraid of darkness like every little kid, and it was my grandpa, either in front of me or behind me, that sorta gave me the courage to be playful in the dark. I knew he was there.
My grandpa had a small TV in his room, and a queen sized bed. The TV was blueish green with a slide of light rose pink. It was the old kind which still had two antennas on its top. My grandpa used to use a cloth to cover it up when it’s not in use. The TV was placed on an old desk with drawers. Those drawers are full of little things that I used to toy with. Rubber band, pen cap, coins, a temperature measurer, notebooks, a small bottle made of glass, anything that belonged to my grandpa or things that I collected (My grandpa used to be a village doctor in a clinic.) At night after I was called to go to bed, I would choose to sleep on the side that closer to the TV, because I noticed that after my grandpa thinks that I fell asleep he would turn on the TV, news or some TV series that was on, and watch it with lights turned off. Sometimes I just rolled to the other side and watch TV with him, I don’t know if he knew those little tricks I pulled but I know for sure that my parents would be crazy mad if they knew I was still awake and lying on the bed watching TV (Because they believe it would hurt my vision.) Most of the nights I would just fall asleep hearing gibberish from the TV. I remember I would roll over to grandpa, I would hug his right arm and put my right leg on his body. I sure didn’t know that I was feeling secure or safe back then, I was too young, right now looking back I know I was because after my teenage I’ve been looking for something similar. I probably just thought it was comfy and satisfying, it takes losing it to realize that I’m just looking for the same feeling people who love me would give me unconsciously.
I remember that when I woke up in the middle of a night, either from a nightmare or I bed-wetted, when I was trying to get back to sleep, I would ask my grandpa to put his hand on my chest, stomach, or my back (when I was a kid I slept on my stomach a lot). I enjoyed the feeling, I felt supported, I felt protected, I felt the warmness. And when I ate something that’s not very easy to digest, he would massage my belly, in a very doctor but grandpa way, I still remember how my belly rumbled when he did that, and those hard chunks of food that stuck in my belly and need some rubbing. I also remember sometimes I really like to ask him to do the dash-line touching on my back, I enjoyed it a lot, a little tickling but enjoyable. When I grew older, I sort of didn’t want to sleep with him anymore, he didn’t want to either because I was all over the bed and he could not get a good sleep and ended up in a headache the next day. So we had another twin sized bed in his bedroom against the wall in the corner, just by the desk the TV was on. In the summer I’d always wanted to lean my body on the wall. I love the sudden coolness it brought, the same coolness when you go to bed and sleep on your stomach and stretch your arm under the pillow. I bed-wet a lot, and yes, even when I was in middle school, every time I did I just jumped over to his bed and continue my sleep. The second morning he would just joke about how I drew those maps on the sheets.
The later period of my childhood, well, more like the period between childhood and teenage. My parents and I moved out, to the other side of the city, into a 3 bedroom apartment-structured unit. Normally we would go back every weekend starting Friday night to Sunday night. Those weekly trips essentially became the source of my happiness and sadness of the entire week. Every time when I jumped out of the car I would try my best yelling “grandpa” at the top floor, (After our moving out, my grandpa moved his room up to the room where we had our kitchen table placed and turned it into his bedroom.) I just thought that he might not hear me. And he would just yell back. By the time he came downstairs, I would run into him and hug him, just like what my cousin would do every time.
I remember he liked tea a lot. Black tea specifically, he loved it thick and bitter. The transparent plastic cup he had, the lid was a bit broken, (yea, by me), every time I made tea for him or he made it, I would just stand there and watch how the dried leaves draw themselves when the building water was poured down, dark, brown but you can still see the green. He was a doctor but had a good handwriting. He would read newspapers or just write something on the notebook drinking the freshly made tea. Sometimes the tea was on a late course, it’s not that bitter anymore, he would always fill it up in case I was thirsty playing outside on our yard with my boys. He would just sit there by the door after dinner on a small stool, talking to neighbors, or just smoking and watching me. I bet he had a clear idea of how wild at playing I was because he always says if I’m not well disciplined and educated, I would someday become a bandit or a robber.
Another thing that reminds me a lot is that he barely praise about me to me directly. He did when it’s to his friends or neighbors about how smart I was or how well I did in school. I’m not sure about his intention if there is but it is just a fact I noticed when I started looking back. Because my parents would sometimes be amazed at how good my memory was and would tell that out loud to me. He wouldn’t. There was one time I memorized a whole Classical Chinese article and a modern textbook passage, and the reciting out loud was required and supervisor’s signature was required, I would go to my grandpa when my parents were busy, and he would be my supervisor and check my memorizing results. I knew that I did a quite good job because I used a short time and got it in my mind, but he would never say that to me. Maybe he’s not impressed because maybe he can do the same? Or maybe he just wanted me to stay humble. I could pretty cocky. Besides that, even if I made a mistake he would not point it out. Sometimes I intentionally recited it with a few character’s difference, like exchanging some words with the synonyms, he would just let it go. I was pretty annoyed by this and told him multiple times that he needs to point it out, but he still wouldn’t. I ended up not going to him for those signature tasks. But it’s always faster than I thought it would be, what really happened was I was kept too busy by school work to even do the weekend trips.
On Sunday nights, when we were on our way back to my home. Sitting on the back seat of the car, looking outside, I would always try to distract myself with things flashing by, because I was sad leaving my grandpa and grandma, I hated going back to my home, I hated starting school on Monday. I played the worst scenarios myself a lot, just in my head. I would think what if they are not there anymore, what if I have to leave for somewhere else and could never see them again. It was heartbroken, I knew it was just in my head but it still tears me apart. Like stings right into my heart. And I know, it’s all in my head. The worst part is that I have to control all those emotions. Since I was a kid I wasn’t good at talking about feelings, to my parents, to anyone, using words. I focused more on how things should be and shouldn’t be. So I have to try my best to not let my parents to see any signs of me being sad. Even if they saw something and asked what I was thinking I would say “nothing” back to them. It later I think became a good thing to me to some extent but I think I suffered from it more. So distractions, I would just allow myself pivoting over imaginations on things I saw on the road. Sometimes I fell asleep when we arrived my mom would wake me up and I would just go straight to my bedroom, half angry half sleepy, but when I was awake, my mind became clear again and those worst scenarios would be vividly playing in my mind. I usually crawl against the wall, using the quilt to cover my head and let myself out silently. I don’t know if this was foreseen by me and I’ve started dealing that grief that time, I’m not a superstitious person, but allowing yourself to give you another perspective, and sometimes comfort, if you’re seeking for it.
After the second stroke. I cried a lot, of course, by myself, he was still in ICU. I was acting all tough-guy in front of my families. As I’ve written earlier, we prepared many things, funeral related things. This was my third year of middle school, crucial for my entrance to high school. I don’t wanna say that I was affected by this on the entrance exam because I knew that consciously, I wasn’t even caring that much, all those tears I had months before numbed my feelings. But my parents always believed that I didn’t do as well as expected was because of this. Maybe, we’ll never know. I managed to get into the best high school in the city by paying a non-negligible entrance fee. Then it was a long streak bedridden time for him. Without the ability to move half his body, without the ability to speak, without the ability to eat via mouth and throat, sometimes even without the ability to recognize us while awake. We are devastated, the whole family, and I felt bad and guilty for my mom and grandma, they have to stay in to look after him day and night. 7 years straight. Sometimes I felt guilty of not doing more for him or mom, sometimes I felt angry about the disease itself, sometimes I even felt helpless myself. Every vocation after middle school became reading time and helping out my mom with chores time. I loved family road trips, we had one. While I was still in 3rd grade if I remembered it right. I was so happy, pure happiness. I was safe and secure. The disease took that all away. I tried not to bring up any of my wanting to my parents because I knew how I could possibly make them feel. I consumed it. I consumed a lot. Having that anger towards no one, I had been upset deep inside.
Sometimes I would think my grandpa made some evil deals with some demons, so I could have a good future, like being admitted to CMU, being able to come to the US and have a decent job, being able to experience what I have experienced, being able to cope the fact that he’s gone throughout years instead of a sudden leave that could possibly break me completely. The guilt of not being able to do anything to help him turned into the guilt of everything I have that I appreciate. When I read the book by Mark Ferrari, I honestly thought maybe this is a sort of indication. And I kept it as a mark, as a symbol, but truly, all I need to understand is, it is life itself.
This was an email thread I had with Mark, the author of The Book Of Joby.
I really appreciated his email. It meant a lot at that time. I wasn’t sad hearing the news that my grandpa passed away, I was numb, I was caught in immediately by all those years’ memory with him, before and after the illness. It left me with many things now I seek endlessly with other human beings, with loved ones, with my family. I know that I need to spend every tiny little second with them when I have the chance, I know that I need to create memories, I know that time is not going to stop, I know that things I fight in life, possessions I have in life, educations I receive in life, when it comes to families, they’re all trivialized.
There’re just so much more to tell about him. They’re assorted pieces in my head that could lead me to a sweet dream when he’s still there. But he is still there.
God gave us memory so we can have roses in December.
– J.M. Barrie