a sad, thoughtful entry for once

Today will be a sad, thoughtful blog. The month of February has been extremely trying for me, and I’m at the point where I’m just trying to get through each day without just losing it and starting to scream at the top of my lungs. Nowadays I seem to feel like doing that a lot. Either that or crawling into bed and sleeping as much as possible, just so I don’t have to be awake thinking about things.

I finally got so fed up with things at work and after one extremely hard week where everyday I went home crying about how much I hated my life and everything in it, I decided to quit. Very quickly thereafter I decided that I was going to move and have spent the last two weeks taking care of loose ends at work and selling off my larger items on craigslist. It’s an exhilarating feeling getting to change everything in your life to hopefully something better, but it’s a whole other type of stress to feel like you’re not in control of what’s going to happen next (especially the job hunting part). It’s even a really nice feeling to purge yourself of all your junk that you don’t need. I’m moving to such a tiny place, but I like that I’m forced to prioritize which things are most important to me and then getting rid of the rest of it. It makes me feel like I’m leaving again, packing up only what I need in a backpack and heading off on another adventure.

More importantly and tragically, my grandmother passed away last Friday night. She was 88 y.o., and passed away peacefully in her sleep. And I miss her. A lot. I know that she was in pain and had already led an extremely full life, but those types of condolences don’t really do much when you simply miss somebody. She was such a wonderful, talented woman and, like my brother and sister, I have extremely fond memories of growing up with her. I’ve been trying hard to remember my specific favorite memory of her, but have had trouble pinpointing one specifically. Instead I remember random snippets of her…like how as a child I would look at her hand and think it looked so old and wrinkly but when I touched it the hand would feel so soft and silky ...or how we stayed with her in taiwan and she taught us how to play mah jong, insisting that we say each tile in chinese before we were allowed to throw it out. or even how she constantly gave me these hideous sweaters that I would take and lie "i love it! thanks!". I sort of wish I had kept all those ugly sweaters now.

I had my last day of work on Friday and I didn’t even finish the day. As soon as I found out that my grandmother probably wouldn’t make it through the day, I literally ran out of the office and drove straightaway to Fremont Kaiser. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to see her while she was still vaguely alert…by the time I was there the toxins and morphine had already taken over and she looked peacefully asleep. Still, I sat there and watched over her with the rest of my family for her last 7 hours. It’s such a weird feeling to watch somebody die in that way. She looked like she would wake up at any moment, but her breath eventually became labored, then shallow, a then with long gaps in between…and finally at 11:15 she just took one last breath. So odd…to just see somebody not take their next breath.

Even odder is the type of camaraderie you feel with these other people waiting there with you. Even for a family like mine where personal things aren’t discussed, where emotions are rarely shown, where hugs are rarely given…we all embraced and cried together when it was time to say goodbye. I’ve seen my Aunt maybe two or three times in the past 10 years, and when she left she was clinging to me harder than anyone else.

Naturally as we all sat there people would discuss little details about my grandma’s life, things I had never heard before. Like how she was an extremely modern woman, how she won a dance contest once, how she couldn’t breastfeed my father when he was born because she was too malnutritioned during the war. I found myself staring at her and wishing that I could have heard all the little details about her life. What was it like for her to have fled China due to the communist regime? What was she thinking the first time she met my grandpa? How did she feel when my dad was born? Just so many thoughts that nobody would know except for her. I wish she could have told me these things. With our language and cultural barrier it was never possible, but even so I’m amazed at how strongly I felt for her. If you think about it...we’ve never even had a real conversation in my entire life, yet we unquestionably doted on each other. I just hope I've become the type of person she hoped I would be.

It has been an utterly surreal experience watching how everybody else in my family has coped. Talking to my father especially, has made me feel extremely emotionally confused. It’s been hard to see my father, a person I’ve come to realize that I respect and depend on in so many ways, in such a vulnerable state . Actually have him to talk to me about his feelings of being confused and lonely made me realize that he was hit harder than any of us grandkids. I found myself hunting fruitlessly for something to comfort him, but this is unchartered emotional territory for my family, and I just wasn’t sure what I should say or how to help him cope.

I miss my Nai Nai.

Forgive me if I’m out of the picture for awhile.