I remember my grandfather was a feisty man, sometimes short-tempered but he never once lost his temper at me. He was the one waiting outside my kindergarten class, waiting to bring me out to walk around before we headed home. Sometimes we went to the police post at the void deck of his old house to look at the fishes in the tank. Each time he brought me out, he never failed to stop by the bakery to get us buns to eat at night or the next morning. I remembered there was once he had too many plastic bags and he asked me to help him and I actually told him that he could squeeze all the small plastic bags into this big plastic bag that he was carrying HAHA omg. I can't believe I was so blur then when I was five.
15 years later, who would've known it would be a reversal of roles. I carried his carrier bag for him as we walked around Ang Mo Kio (his old house area!) looking for food after accompanying him for his radiation therapy session. It pained me to see how tired he was and how much difficulty he had in walking; he was limping and it was probably from the pain at his cancer site.
Over the years, his temper toned down, we grew up and eventually the fear of him berating us for misbehaving subsided HAHA. I used to be quite scared of him! I remembered when I was in p6, my cousins and I were beginning to learn how to cycle and we started cycling every week whenever we met. We brought our bicycles down to my grandparents' house (by then they moved to the ground floor unit) and we would race each other. It was so much fun cycling outside, circling my grandfather's block. But each time we neared my grandfather's house, we would have to slow down by ALOT because my grandfather would be standing by the gate watching us and he would keep going, "slow down, slow down!!!". There was once I had a damn bad fall cos I skidded whilst cycling around the bend and got a very bad scolding from him oops hahahah.
Ever since my grandparents shifted house from AMK to Khatib, his visits to our house became more frequent and he never failed to come with so much yummy tau pok (srsly the only tau pok that i actually eat hahaha), The New Paper (he never failed to purchase a copy to read on top of The Straits Times everyday) and library books that he borrowed for us. He always came in the afternoon and he was always perspiring so much whenever he came ><
I remember his love for nature and all animals, from the dogs to cats to lizards. When he was still living in his old flat, cats would loiter at the void deck waiting to be fed. That was because he kept cat food in his letter box and would feed them everyday when he checked his letter box. Eventually he started letting the cats in to sleep with him at night and it affected his health because he was asthmatic. He didn't let us kill any lizards because he felt lizards were our friends as they eat mosquitoes hahah.
I remembered my cousin and I used to celebrate our birthdays together when we were younger cos our birthdays are two days apart! She's 2 days younger than me haha. My grandfather liked it when we celebrate our birthdays on Sundays when we meet cos he likes being part of the celebration haha. I guess he found joy in celebrating our birthdays and knowing that we're growing older and wiser. He never failed to give us ang baos on the Sunday before our birthday and he always wrote our birthday date on the ang bao! Which prob means that he actually knows the exact date of our birthdays! However over the years, we stopped celebrating our birthdays together cos we were busier and sometimes we couldn't make it for dinner on Sundays. But this year, my grandfather insisted on us celebrating our birthdays and kept reminding my uncle to get the birthday cake as he had no strength to walk out of his house to get the cake himself. I guess he sort of knew that his time was coming even though we totally didn't know what was happening until the time when we brought him to the hospital...
It was just a mere visit to the hospital over his chest pain and we found out so much more... Our worst fears came true. Life is too unfair... Everything happened so fast after that hospital visit and it was just so painful watching him deteriorate. He was so optimistic even at the hospital when we didn't break the news to him, but subsequently when he was told, he was still cheery but I guess he accepted it and was prepared to let go. The next day after he was discharged, we visited him and he directed my brother to his drawers and asked my brother to take out this stack of angbaos and money. He was too frail then to get out of bed and when my brother passed the whole stack to him, he removed this ang bao that already had my brother's name and his typical birthday note (dear xxx, happy birthday and god bless you. kong kong, birthday date) and wished my brother happy birthday and kept apologising for forgetting that it was his birthday as he didnt know the date. It wasn't even my brother's birthday yet. It was 27th July and my brother's birthday was on 10th August.
In the subsequent days when we visited him, he was so cute haha he was smiling in bed and telling us that he had a box of snacks for us in his room and we can eat it whenever we're hungry. That was what he usually does on Sundays when we gather tgt; he would go around distributing the snacks in his room to all of us but this time, he asked us to help ourselves to it as he didn't have the strength to get out of bed.
My grandfather treated his plants with so much love and patience that he could even save a dying rose plant. The plant probably belonged to one of my aunt's neighbours and she brought it down to my grandfather's house to see what he could do about it. He managed to save it and it eventually bloomed, sadly, he couldn't see it physically as he was bedridden by then.
He was a strong man, definitely mentally strong as he refused to take any of his morphine medicine until the day he passed away. I never once heard him moan in pain and he was always smiling whenever we asked him to HAHA. My uncle would usually tease him and he would smile for us! However, most of the time he was sleeping and the reality of my grandfather's condition finally dawned on my grandmum then. She left for work in the morning and came back in the late afternoon but my grandfather was still sleeping and he refused to wake up. She was crying as she touched his chin and telling him to stop sleeping as he had been sleeping for so long :/ it was only then that he mustered the strength to open his eyes and tell her that he was tired and asked her to let him sleep for a while more ><
Slightly more than a week after the hospital visit, this was his final resting place. It was what he wanted, to be buried and not cremated, and my dad had a lot of difficulty in asking my grandfather that question :'( A month later when I visited this cemetery, it was so tranquil and peaceful, there were strong winds even as the scorching hot sun bore down on us. My dad and I walked through the tombstones, looking out for interesting decorations and names, but who would have known the stories that lay buried together with the dead. Stories of their final moments, their personalities, the grieving process and the fond but yet painful memories probably untold to passersby like us looking at their tombstones out of curiosity.
As I reached my grandfather's grave, the painful memories of his last hours came flooding back in. It felt like a part of me still can't let go fully. I remember feeling very lost and terrified when I realised his limbs were cold, trying desperately to call my cousins and waking my dad up. We were supposed to let him sleep for 3 hours as he hadn't been sleeping for the past few days but his rest was very badly interrupted >< I remember holding on to my grandfather's hands and feeling the warm hands that I felt earlier in the day turn cold and stiff. I remember each of us talking to him, telling him our last words, telling him to not struggle and to follow the Light. I remember we played one of his favourite Christian songs twice, where the lyrics went, "To the river I am going bringing sins I cannot bear/ Come and cleanse me, come forgive me Lord I need to meet you there/
In these waters, healing mercy flows with freedom from despair/ I am going, to that river Lord I need to meet you there/
Precious Jesus, I am ready to surrender every care/ Take my hand now, lead me closer Lord I need to meet you there." Our tears flowed freely, but we tried to smile and reassure him that we will take care of our grandmother when he left. And our very cute grandmother also said she will take care of everything hahaha. I have a slightly autistic cousin and she was too afraid to be in the room with us as we talked to our grandfather and she sat outside in the living room praying and drawing a picture for our grandfather. She drew a picture of a big house, my grandfather and Jesus holding hands in the house. We brought it in and showed it to my grandfather and my uncle reassured my grandfather that this was the big house that he would be helping us to build in heaven. My grandfather smiled super broadly when he saw the picture as he was lying in bed. Strangely, he asked to be sitted up in bed and with much difficulty, we managed to prop him upright with pillows and my cousin and uncle supporting these pillows with their legs. Imagine a room with my grandfather's bed at the end and 11 of us surrounding him (super squeezy but we made do), he probably got his last wish granted, as he had told the palliative nurse that he wanted to see his family members in his last hour. His breaths became harder and more forceful as he breathed deeply in through his nose and breathed out through his mouth in spurts of air along with a bit of saliva. His eyes opened very widely and he seemed to be staring intently at something but nonetheless, we did our final rounds of standing in front of him and telling him, 'kong kong, xxx here.' As we finished talking to him, he turned his head slightly to my dad, gave a slight smile and he stopped spurting out air from his mouth and with that, we knew he had passed on. My dad helped to close his eyes fully. I just squatted there, feeling very dazed. This wasn't how he should have gone, in so much pain and sickness. It was just so unfair that his cancer cells had spread when we were all trying to hard to kill those stupid cells. He had so much hope for the future, for his good health to come back, for us to grow up and graduate from school and probably to watch us get married and settle down.
On the first day of his wake, I broke down as I saw him lying in his coffin, it was too hard to accept that someone I was so used to meeting every Sunday was now in the coffin, and he was never going to respond to my calls or talk to me ever again. Gone was the grandfather who never failed to answer his handphone whenever I called him, the grandfather who helped me in so many of my art and craft projects when I was in primary school, the grandfather who could speak to me in fluent English and knew more about politics than I ever did, the grandfather who was always opened the door whenever we called out, "kong kong" and the grandfather who never failed to make me drink chicken essence whenever I visited him on weekdays after school/work. He drinks his chicken essence chilled but I dont like mine chilled so he always keeps spare bottles unchilled for us. I still cannot accept that he is gone forever because it just feels like he's going on a very long holiday and I keep looking forward to the day when he will come back to reunite with the rest of us.
And so, this is his grave but the flowers at the sides are still growing, it will probably take some time for the grave to look pretty. My parents recently attended the funeral mass of a parish priest who passed away and one of the priests who gave a eulogy mentioned that it is okay to miss someone, but it isn't okay to feel sad and wish that the person is still with us because Heaven is a better place for him. But it's really damn hard to not feel sad; we had so many regrets and it's just unfair that he suffered in the final moments of his death.
We were looking through his belongings and discovered this whistle that he made on his display shelf! It's super fragile as he made the white part out of the kitchen serviettes and glued the parts together. Basically you have to move the top part up and down and there will be a sharp whistle sound when you're doing it. SUPER COOL WE DIDN'T EVEN KNOW WHAT IT WAS AT FIRST.
Along with his creativity in creating things out of simple wood scraps, he also had the mind of a young child haha. He liked collecting figurines of animals and we discovered this when we visited him. He displayed these figurines by his bedside and he even named the dogs and wrote a rough estimate of their ages. HAHA and he even had this imaginary dog show and awarded one of the dogs the first prize. Super cute please hahaha.
My cousin gave him this excavator to build but he was confused by the instructions and couldn't finish building it. We only realised that he was stuck halfway when he was sick :( We completed it that day and passed him the remote control to play with it. Haiz we could have done this earlier and he would have been in a better condition to play with this.
He liked fixing all these wooden parts and we would give him many projects to do and this were some of the completed ones. He also liked painting and he painted these well haha.
There are many more prettier handicrafts that he has done but he hid all of them under his bed as those were fragile and we will probably take them out to decorate it when we clear up and build another display shelf for it. It was a pity that we only discovered them when he was sick :/
My grandfather was nothing short of wonderful, he was my closest grandparent and it was just so easy talking to him. There were no awkward moments whenever we talked and I miss him so much. It's not easy letting go and I'm so scared I will forget him as I grow older, I'm afraid I will forget his smile, the familar and nice smell (probably from his hair cream hehe he's quite a vain person) of his room or how he looked if I try to let go.
Till we meet again in heaven, Kong Kong ♥
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