Goodbye Too Soon

There were a number of subjects I had planned to write about for this particular post. Bryan Robson. Coconut. Galileo’s Daughter. The factoids that had made me go, “Oooh!” But I’m not going to. I’m going to write about something that’s painful and personal and, until yesterday, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to talk about.

But I feel I have to, because it was an important event for me on so many levels. But before I go on, I should probably say this isn’t meant to a eulogy or tribute; I don’t think I could do my subject justice. I am simply putting down my random thoughts.

Last Friday, I said my last goodbye to my Uncle Leong.

He would have been 67 in June, and was my Dad’s sister’s husband. He had been diagnosed with stage four lung cancer just before Christmas, and whilst we could all see how rapidly he was deteriorating, we still had faith in chemotherapy, in the doctors, in him to recover – quite simply, we were desperately clinging on to hope.

Sometimes that’s all you can do when you don’t want to face up to reality – yet. And I think that’s what I did. He’d been so much a part of my life – our relationship goes back over 30 years – that I couldn’t imagine him not being around. It was when I saw his portrait over the altar at the wake that it slowly began to sink in – and even then I kept expecting him to turn up with a huge grin on his face and ask, in his jovial, slightly cheeky way, what we were doing there. Even as I write this, I still find it surreal that he is gone, and that Chinese New Year next month will be the first of many family celebrations without him. It is just so difficult to believe that he died exactly one week ago today.

He was the first non-relative to register on my consciousness, and was, in that sense, the person who made me aware that people could marry into family, the first “uncle” I knew whom I wasn’t related to. We didn’t start off on the right foot – unfortunately for him, he came into my life just as I was beginning to have feelings of family, possessiveness and territorialism. All throughout his courtship of my aunt, I did my best to antagonize him the best way a pre-schooler knows how. Any other 30-something-year-old man would just probably not have given me the time of day, but he always laughed and accommodated me. Bribed me with sweets and cakes. Stopped to talk. Tried to be friends. He was nice when he didn’t have to be.

Of course, he could have done all those things because he wanted to make a good impression on Ah Mah and my aunts (at whose house I spent a great amount of toddler time), but, knowing him as I do now, I believe it that was just the sort of person he was. You see me looking like a right old grump in their wedding photo, but in the three decades since then we have had the most brilliant, laugh-a-minute relationship. He was a wonderfully good-natured and friendly man, whose only fault was that he smoked. We used to joke about how I would come visit him and yell “I told you so!” when he was dying in hospital from some horrible smoking-related disease – I wish I had known then how prophetic our words would be.

I wish for so many other things, too. I wish I could have seen and talked to him one more time before he slipped into a coma. I wish he could have made it for the Christmas party – our last family gathering before he died. I wish I had nagged him more aggressively over the last 25 years about his smoking. (I used to make a real show out of holding my nose when talking to him – even when he was without a cigarette.) I wish he could have had stopped smoking for good when he did stop. I wish he had been diagnosed sooner, perhaps more could have been done.

Above all, I wish he had never had cancer and that he were still with us. I wish that I had said more to him when he was alive, when I held his hand at his bedside in the hospital. I should have said thank you for taking me to my first football match. For your off-kilter sense of humour, funny remarks and silly jokes which always made us laugh. For teaching me how to armpit-fart. For taking us out for the best crispy fried chicken in town whenever we came to visit, even though you didn’t earn all that much money as a tailor. For your kind and generous spirit. For taking an interest in my life. For putting up with a bossy four-year-old brat who threatened to let the air out of your car tyres because she didn’t like you invading her little kingdom of Ah Mah’s house to spend time with her aunt. For simply being such a fantastic uncle.

But he always came across as old-school Chinese when it came to deep emotion, and I don’t know if it might have been too awkward for both of us to talk about how I felt. I wish now that I had tried, though. Instead, I treated him no differently than I would have on any other occasion. We had never told each other “I love you”, choosing to express warmth and affection in the form of good-natured insults, and so at the hospital I cracked jokes, which made him laugh (which in turn sent him into a coughing spasm, and made me feel horribly guilty that I had perhaps exacerbated his condition). He was always so happy to see any one of us at the hospital.

I last saw him alive on December 29. Would that I could turn back the clock. When the call from Dad came at 1pm last Tuesday, I cried for him, for my aunt and cousins, for my memories and for all I hadn’t said. I wish I had gone home one weekend earlier than planned – now I know that a goodbye too soon is better than never saying one properly. It’s true: the two saddest words in the English language are “if only”.

One thing I was painfully aware of as I looked back on Uncle Leong’s life and our relationship was that his passing is the first in his generation, the generation of my parents, my other uncles and aunts. The thought that it is this group of people I will have to say goodbye to in the not-too-distant future – what, the next 10, 20 years? – fills my heart with a cold, icy emptiness. When Ah Mah died, I grieved for her as a grandchild, a young person who has lost someone dearly loved. I now grieve as an adult, not only for the uncle I have lost, but for what I know must come. It just makes me try harder to build more memories.

I told him all I should have said when he was alive at the funeral and over three nights of wakes, adding, for good measure and in the spirit of our relationship, that if he had wanted to get out of giving me an ang pau when I finally got married, this was a rather extreme way to avoid it. But I’m sure Uncle Leong, who was always so low-maintenance, happy-go-lucky and fuss-free, wouldn’t have wanted me – us – to mourn. He’d have thought it too maa faan, or troublesome in Cantonese. Having had to bury his own father when he was courting my aunt, resulting in the wedding being postponed for three years in accordance with Chinese mourning rites, he knew how stifling and restrictive Chinese funereal traditions could be, and didn’t want to put my aunt and cousins – or indeed any one of us – through that. He knew he was going to die, and yet he thought of us, like he always did. All he said was that he wanted a simple funeral, and for us to cast off the sackcloth at the graveside – a symbolic gesture marking the end of mourning and getting on with life as normal.

Life will go back to “normal”, whatever normal means when you have to say goodbye too soon. I guess that’s when memories sustain you. I have realized, in the five days since the funeral, that I cannot remember what Uncle Leong looked like when I said goodbye for the last time. The peaceful face I saw in the coffin was at once one I knew and didn’t know. But I still see him clearly in my mind’s eye, alive, eyes twinkling, mouth open wide in the silent laugh we all knew so well. And that is how I think I want to remember him.

Uncle Leong, wherever you are, I’m sorry I didn’t get to tell you this when you were alive. But I’m sure you already know by now. Thank you for having been part of my life. I love you and will miss you very much.