Goodbye, Gua Ma

It’s taken me a while to get around to this, but I didn’t really know where to start. But I knew I had to, because it’s something I want to remember – I don’t want to look back on it through a clouded glass in maybe 10 or 15 years to come. It’s a significant coincidence for me, though, that I’m finally getting round to it exactly seven weeks since it’s happened – New Year’s Eve will mark the end of the 49-day mourning period for Gua Ma.

It was about 7.30pm on November 11 that Dad called. We’d just had dinner and I was settling down for the evening, and I started off the conversation by joking if this was one of his “toilet break” calls, since it was about 3.30am back home. When he said he had some bad news, I thought perhaps a family friend had died – and my heart gave a little start just in case it was Dusty or Lucky.

But no. It was Gua Ma. I certainly didn’t expect it. I had always thought of her as a woman death would have to fight hard to take. She was always so strong, so formidable, so indomitable in both body and spirit. So to hear that she had died came as such a shock, I didn’t know how to react. And then it hit home and the dam burst.

I wept for many things.

For her, because she had lived the last two years of her life in a care home, away from the one that was familiar to her. Her mind was going – the early stages of Alzheimer’s or dementia – and couldn’t take care of herself. But she didn’t understand why she was in care and was always asking to go home. I cried because I wondered if in her reduced state, she had died feeling unloved and uncared for. She had had such a hard life, and it just felt so sad and tragic that in her last days, she had to relive it all over again – as she regressed, she would constantly worry about money.

For Mum, because I knew she would take it hard – she had taken on herself so much of the responsibility of caring for Gua Ma over the last 10 years. Because I knew how difficult it had been for her to make the decision to put her own mother into care. It was like our very own personal version of King Lear. Gua Ma never understood – she always saw it as a betrayal of filial piety, when it was exactly the opposite. Despite all the awful things Gua Ma said to her, Mum never stopped caring for her. It must be double heartbreak to know your parent is deteriorating and is not fully aware of what she is saying, and have to suffer the pain of those very cutting words.

For me, because I had just lost my grandmother, my last link with my past. I’ve only known two grandparents my whole life, and it is so strange, even now, to think that this was someone who had seen me grow up. I certainly didn’t know how long my grandmothers would live, but feel very blessed that there was one for me throughout my adult life. I felt like I had lost a piece of my history. I also wept because it was the second death in the family within a year, and I felt I was losing my loved ones faster than I was ever prepared to let them go.

I was not as close to Gua Ma as I was with Ah Mah, and it was for that that I grieved above all. As a child, I was always reluctant to go visit her, because I thought her bossy, loud and domineering. But as I began to see her with adult eyes, I found her wise, with a sly – and often crude, in the way that only Hakka women can be – sense of humour. She looked out for her family first and foremost, and when I thought of what she went through to bring them up – walking all the way from Kuala Lumpur, losing two husbands, giving up two children and losing another two – I couldn’t help but feel pride and amazement. For 10 years, I’d thought of dragging Josh back home with me on weekends, so we could both talk to Gua Ma and find out more about her, about how she came to Kuantan, about what life was like for the family. It never happened, and it’s never going to happen now. She had a remarkable life, and I just feel so sad that she never really told us about it and that she wasn’t really given the chance to do so. I just hope she knew she was loved.

I used to get really annoyed with Gua Ma at times, but I’m glad she lived as long as she did so I could get to know what she was really like. Even as we celebrated Christmas this year, I thought back to the last one – how fast a year goes by – when she was at our house and clearly enjoying being out of the care home. She was never afraid of speaking her mind, whether asked for her opinion or not – and last year she berated a few of our neighbours for just coming over for the Christmas food and not even bothering to speak to their hosts. She was inadvertently funny and if she found something funny, she’d let out a very hearty, loud guffaw. She had the crudest, most amazing vocabulary when it came to swearing or telling someone else, an attribute that never ceased to amuse and appal us in equal measure. She was incredibly independent – many people in town have an enduring memory of her cycling around well into her 70s (no mean feat given the roads in Malaysia), and after she had her kneecap replaced, she would take the bus in to visit friends. She wasn’t one for sitting around in one place.

I have too many memories of Gua Ma to list, and I think it says a lot that most of them make me laugh. I last saw her alive on April 28, a few days before I left to come here. When I saw her again last month, in the coffin, it just felt surreal. She didn’t look anything like I remembered her. To be sure, in the one year I had been here, she had lost a lot of weight and had had her hair cut short, but she still looked so different. Knowing what we did of her, I almost expected her to sit up and grumble, in the same manner she usually did over restaurant-cooked food, “You paid how much for this coffin? It’s too small! I could make a better one!”

I had done all my weeping on Gareth’s shoulders and on the flight back, and when I looked at Gua Ma, I just felt overwhelming sadness and loss, because of what she would never be able to tell us now, and of what I would never know or tell her. It was a feeling compounded at the funeral. When Ah Mah died in 1993, it was difficult seeing the coffin being put into the grave. But it was even more difficult seeing Gua Ma’s coffin being wheeled into the incinerator at the crematorium. It was a horrible place to be, so bereft of emotion, built to drive home the pain and anguish of your bereavement, it just felt so wrong that a woman who had been so full of life would have her final goodbye there.

As we drove away, the wisps of black smoke floating out the chimney, I thought, that’s my Gua Ma, and said a quiet goodbye. I did the same when we took a boat ride out into the sea to release her ashes the next day. I now understand the poignancy of the act – I found it hard to believe that all that remained of Gua Ma, who was so much larger than life in life, was in two bundles in a basket.

Chinese New Year will feel that little bit emptier when I go home in February. I don’t doubt that it is because I’m over here, away from home, that I can maintain some kind of emotional distance. If I were back home, I would feel the loss more keenly. Yet I do think about how strange it would feels that, if I am ever home again around Cheng Beng, I won’t have a grave to visit and hence, nowhere I can place a sense of Gua Ma. But perhaps that is how it should be. She never could sit still in life – always on the move. I like to think that now, she can be everywhere.