Farewell for Now

Granny left us on the 16th day of the first month of the Lunar calendar, just after the official end of the customary 15 days of celebration accompanying the Spring Festival, the most important holiday of the year to the Chinese. She was 93 years of age on paper, though by all accounts she was really 96. She was mother to 3, grandmother to 9 (of which I am the youngest), and great-grandmother to more than a dozen children.

I got the call from my parents at 4.30am on 1 March 2010. By the time I saw her, she was cold, so cold. I knew that her spirit had already gone home, and what a spirit it had been!

I don't know the dates surrounding the important details in her life... I only knew that she came to Singapore alone on a ship when she was around 9 years old, and that she married my grandfather as a second wife before she turned 20 years of age. I knew that she was widowed young, probably not yet 5 years into her marriage. She never remarried, though it was not that she lacked suitors. She used to tell me that she worried about how her children might be treated if she remarried... and for love of them, she struggled through their growing years, and through the Japanese Occupation during WW2, to bring them into adulthood.

Grandma was a woman of principle, strong-willed to the point of stubborness, capable, in equal measure, of massive anger or great tenderness. There had been so much sorrow in her long life, so many untimely deaths. There was also much bodily discomfort - broken hipbone, bad leg, weak heart, stomach cancer... I have lost track of the number of operations she had had, and of the number of times she had been in hospitals, until neither doctors, nor the stark white of a hosital bed, were strangers to her.

But I like to think that there had been many moments of great joy too. I remember her wonderful sense of humour, her gentle hands, her spirit of adventure, and her courage despite the rocky roads that she navigated in her journey through Life. Most of all, I will cherish the great love that she had for me, and for all her family. She never stopped believing in me, though there had been times when I had stopped believing in myself.

These are the things that my grandmother taught me:

1) Never compromise your principles.
2) Work hard, while there is work to be done, and you have the ability to do it.
3) Trust God, and praise Him always, especially in times of hardship.
4) Never forget an act of kindness done to you.
5) Don't drink too much cold water.
6) Be kind to animals.
7) Never be afraid to love.
8) Never throw in the towel.

Goodbye, Grandma. Fly free, at last, released from this mortal coil.