“I must go to the toilet,” she says. “I want to move my bowels.”
So there is some bodily sensitivity left. There are parts of her body which are still communicating with her mind. It won’t be long before even this fragile link is broken and her mind will be adrift, flung into the open, raging sea where nothing, absolutely nothing, can save her anymore.
“You can go right where you are. You have a new kind of chamber pot under you. It’s so modern these days. Just go and it will be all right,” I say, using an analogy my brothers and sisters use, trying to keep the tears out of my voice.
“Is that right? You mean I can go right here?”
“That’s right.”
“Okay, lah,” she says, too quick to acquiesce, as if there’s no more fight in her.
When the two nurses come in to change her diaper, I stay to watch so that I can be her nurse when she goes home. It’s a witnessing that will be imprinted on my soul forever, a witnessing that tears me apart. It seems to me the final insult to her. There must be some spirit left in my mother because I am sure I can see the precise moment when she flees from this gross indignity which she has to submit to. She allows her body to go limp, as though she is not at home, so that she herself does not have to witness others taking charge of her body, invading crevices and private flesh whose textures were so far only known to herself and her husband. The young, foreign nurses are not privy to this, unsuspecting that they are gladiators in an emotional arena. Imported from China and the Philippines, they prattle incessantly to her in English as they go about their task, like mothers do when changing their babies, cooing and prattling, talking baby-talk, expecting no reply. This is what my mother has become. How easy we become how others see us, or treat us. She has re-entered her childhood, folded into herself. A long time ago, she passed the baton to me to finish the race. Now she is moving backwards to the starting line and I can feel the space between us getting wider as I move forward, and she back.
As the weeks in the hospital trundle along on leaden feet, I watch with anguish as this fault in the ground widens and widens, a yawning chasm that is caused by the turbulence underfoot. That is when I know that her geography has altered beyond repair. There are more features of this new landscape that are unfamiliar than familiar. But we still take her home when the hospital needs the bed, when nothing else can be done for her there. The hip has to heal on its own, the X-rays show a clear fracture that can only be healed if she’s completely immobilised.
“She mustn’t walk for another month or so,” the orthopaedist says. “However, in her case, because she is suffering from Alzheimer’s, it is possible that after that period is over, she may not remember how to walk again.”
The prognosis is another tremor on top of the quake. How long more can her foundations last? But they say in the Yukon, that fireweed, a beautiful red-blooded flower, can germinate from poor quality soil that has been in a fire; and fossils and long-buried treasures can be unearthed during a quake. So too my mother’s condition bring out the hidden qualities in my brothers and sisters, all of them rallying around trying their best to make Mak comfortable and happy. There is a unity in the family again, like different peoples in a nation going to war. When Mak was able and had us around for lunch every Sunday, we had been very close, even going to play squash together in the late afternoon, brothers and sisters, and some of our children. But when Mak stopped cooking, each of the families, particularly Jacob’s and Romia’s, stopped meeting frequently. But now, we come together again, to fight this battle together. Matthew is endearingly tender when he attends to our mother, feeding her, coaxing her to eat, wiping her mouth, tucking her into bed, soothing her when she gets agitated. For a man, he is unbelievably sensitive and nurturing. Romia tries to hide his core of softness by talking loudly and laughing, and he looks somewhat displaced with his large body and his huge hands spoon-feeding our mother. Only Jacob seems to retain his manly persona. Although he visits often, he can’t bring himself to cross into uncharted territory where he has to play mother to his own mother. He finds it difficult to feed her. But I notice that he is not as cool and calm as he appears to be. He is hurting badly inside, hurting because his mother lies in the bed having been battered by his father and battered by life, yet he cannot say the things he would have liked to say to her. His tears are often close to the surface but he talks in a brusque manner to pretend otherwise. Perhaps, he, like Agatha, feels he has to disguise his soft-centre with a loud voice and strong opinions to throw off the real scent.
Bernadette is rapidly wilting. Never one to be energetic before, this constant to-and-froing from office to hospital has taken a great toll and she complains of backache and vertigo and all sorts of other ailments. It is interesting that whenever she visits, Mak would revert to her pidgin English when talking to her, prefixing her name with Marm in the way that Maria would address her as if somewhere along the way, she has become Bernadette’s servant. Agatha’s commitment to some new religious sect is manifesting itself in her mellower manner and more thoughtful ways. She had phoned around to cousins and a former kampong resident so that they can come and bid Mak their farewells. Agatha is supremely efficient, getting all the supplies we need to take care of a bedridden person at home. She even manages to locate a hospital bed for homeusers and even paid for it in its entirety. Because Mak cannot understand what is happening to her, she needs to have a cot to ensure that she doesn’t try to get out of bed. Also she requires a bed that can be cranked up and down to feed and change her. By the time Mak is discharged, the bed has arrived and is installed in place of the old single bed in the room. But the person who returns is not the same one who went.
Nineteen
Now it is down to Maria and myself to attend to Mak’s daily needs as everybody returns to their jobs and their normal way of life. I sit by my mother whilst Maria carries out her household duties. Mak’s sleeping pattern has changed and though aided by Valium, can only sleep in the morning and is up all night.
“She’s afraid to sleep,” my cousin, Rose, says.
She’s the elder of Great Aunt’s two daughters and is a janitor at the local swimming pool complex. She has been very frequent in her visits to the hospital and always brings my mother and myself something to eat. Although she speaks a kind of pidgin English picked up from her years of working, I was astonished to discover that she couldn’t read a simple message. I had called her one day and her 20-something-year-old son answered the phone and he said she was out. I told him to write a message to tell her to call me because he was going out before Rose got back.
He said, “There’s no point in writing a message. My mother cannot read.”
The impact of his words was like a thunderbolt. So this was how I would have ended up if my mother had not perservered and got me into school. I would be middle-aged like Rose, and in this modern thriving metropolis, with signs everywhere — on taxis, buses, noticeboards, government letters and junk-mail coming through the post, newspapers, copy on advertisements, labels on bottles, packages — I would not be able to read. When I put the phone down, I had to catch my breath, as though I had been teetering on the edge of a dangerous precipice. This is what my mother has rescued me from, pulled me back from a huge crevasse even before she knew I had to be rescued. Of course, it’s not just the ability to read that is of importance, it’s the world she has opened to me, the opportunities, the pleasures and the capacity to be challenged. I think of all the wonderful mothers in the world who have given so much of themselves to their children, and I pray that children everywhere are grateful for the gifts their mothers have given them, even if it looks as if there had been no apparent gifts. Pause, think and remember.
“What’s there to be afraid of,” I ask my cousin.
“You know. The other world,” Rose says, in her simple manner. “My mother was like that before she died. I was the one who watched over her. They start seeing things.”
I’m not sure I concur with her view t
hat Mak is afraid but she certainly has started to talk to people I cannot see. It’s disconcerting to be there when she’s talking to a blank space in the wall. It’s as if a door to the other world has opened for her.
“Who are you talking to, Mak?”
“Second Sister,” she says. “She wants to take me with her.”
In our culture, when people start talking like that, it’s a sure sign that their own end is not far away. I was at the hospital the day that my father died. He was in great pain, only the morphine stopping him from going mad. He kept on looking at his hands and asking me the time. Then he said, “Ah Kou (his late mother) is here. Ah Kou is calling me. Ah Kou is calling me.” He died that same evening.
“Do you want to go?”
“I’m thinking about it. Look, Elder Sister is calling, too.”
So I pass the information on to the family and they all come to see her, sons, daughters, grandchildren, great-grandchildren (the second great-grandchild had arrived a few months before). And for the first time, I am wishing her to go, too. It’s a terrible thing to wish for your mother’s own demise, someone you love beyond words. You feel like a traitor to have this thought, are raked with guilt. I am torn between wanting her to get better and wanting her to go when there is still shreds of her dignity left. There are days when I hold her hand and watch her trying to catch her breath, struggling and struggling; and I think, if only I have the courage to help her end it all. It would be simple, nobody needs to know, a pillow over her face and she will be released. Up until this moment, I have never thought like this. Up until this moment, when I have never known what it is like to suffer as you watch the one you love, fighting for a few scraps of breath, knowing that pain is torching her arthritic body, her broken hip, her mind torn asunder, I have never known what it’s like to want to terminate a life, but now I do. Watching her in so much agony, I can only hope that her soul knows what it is doing. Her words from long ago came back to me, “Work that calls is guided by soul to express spirit. It is work that will bring you greatest happiness.”
Perhaps this is the work she came for, who is to know? Her words stirred something in me, reminded me of my own quest. I have always wanted to be a full-time writer. It will bring me the greatest hapiness, I know. So what am I doing still struggling in a business that doesn’t fulfill me? Yes, there are the bills and mortgage to pay, but I can always find new excuses. If I want to follow my dream, I just have to do it, not allow other people’s opinions and circumstances to inhibit me. I may not make any headway, may never get published. But at least I would have given it my best shot. I owe it to my mother, too. She had prepared the grounds for me, gave me the education I needed to be a writer. Now I just have to do it. I promise myself that when I get back to England, I shall tell David of my plans, get him to find someone else to handle the marketing for the holiday business. It is time for me to live my dream.
In Holland, they have just legalised euthanasia. Yes, there are moral implications to this. But until you have watched a loved one struggling with such pain, you would not dream that you could wish for their demise. I would never, never judge those who might make that final step for their loved ones. Because now I know the knife-edge that they walk on. Yet, I believe in karma, believe in the ways of the spirit, believe that in her soul-knowledge, my mother has her purpose and reason for clinging on to mortal life, so we must not take away her choice. I believe that a debilitating brain does not override the wisdom of the soul. But I cannot say that I am always strong in my beliefs, I am mortal, too. Agatha, who is well into spiritual energies and entities, say what I dare not say to everybody, “Let her go. We must all let her go, otherwise we are holding back her spirit and she’ll be earthbound.”
Of all people, it is Jacob who wouldn’t let her go. And Bernadette.
“You’re so hard,” my sister says to us, bursting into tears.
Matthew tries to soothe her. “I know it’s painful for you, Dette. But think of how Mak’s suffering. Think of how, if she is capable of knowing, how she wouldn’t like to be what she is today. She used to be so independent.”
Each day finds my mother dwindling a little bit more, the change so perceptible that you can’t imagine that there is any life left. A former neighbour from Potong Pasir turns up when she hears of Mak’s situation. Sylvia is a middle-aged Eurasian lady who had lived in the room in front of 52B. Although her place was called a house, it was no more than a small room with a living area cum kitchen, though it included a bathroom but no toilet. Their jamban was more posh than ours, though this term is relative; they had a key to theirs and it was only shared by two homes. When she moved in, she had a little boy, Leonard, aged four. Her Indian husband, a schoolteacher, had affairs all the time she lived there and there was little money left over for food, and herself and Lenny. Every time he came home, there would be a fight and my mother would pick Lenny out of the crossfire of their battles. Sylvia was so frustrated and lonely that poor Lenny got the brunt of her temper. Always, it was my mother who rescued Lenny, pulling him out from under her rotan, soothing him as he screamed in fear.
“Your mother used to scrimp amd save some food for me each day,” she says tearfully after coming out of Mak’s room. “Sometimes an egg, sometimes some rice. I’ll never forget it until the day I die. She was so hard-up herself and yet she would never see me go hungry. And without her, Lenny won’t be alive. And now, look, he’s a father with a daughter of his own.”
I am so glad that Sylvia has come to remind me of the woman who has disappeared. It is so easy to forget. Every 60 seconds grow into an hour, then into a day, then a week, months, years, the distance between us and that memory widening. Within each of those minutes and hours, something else happens to us and each incident is piled upon another until the incident furthest away in time gets buried amongst the rest. Unless we remember to retrieve some memories from the mud, it is easy to forget. It is the same with someone you know. If the person is no longer in your sphere of interaction, it is easy to forget them. If the person with you is not at all like the person they were, it is as though the person in the past is gone. It’s the same with my mother, she is no longer what she used to be and our current perception of her is how we see her today. It takes someone like Sylvia to exhume the mother we know, breathe back life into the essence of the woman who was Catherine Koh Soon Neo, the nonya and bibik of Kampong Potong Pasir. We have to keep on reminding ourselves that we must learn to look beyond present appearances and behaviour to uncover what is real. There is a Buddhist lesson here somewhere.
But what is reality? Is it only something we can perceive? Does it mean that that which we can’t see with our mortal eyes, hear with our physical ears, feel with our senses is not real? My mother behaves as if there is another world which is now open to her, a world still shuttered to us ordinary folks. She is visited by people long dead, she converses with them as if they are as solid as Maria and myself. It is uncanny that she would turn her head to face the door as if someone is actually walking through, cork her ears in a certain angle and direction as if to hear better, expresses emotion as if what the other person is saying is either funny or sad. She often laughs, sometimes argue. We learn to get used to this. But this morning, when I return from my swim, she is crying in agitation, with Maria trying to comfort her. Maria doesn’t understand either Malay or Teochew and so is not privy to the things that bothers Mak sometimes.
“What’s the matter?” I ask her.
“Ah Tetia is here,” she says. “He wants me to go with him. But I don’t want to, I don’t want to.”
At last, her true feelings about him is revealed. When he was alive, she voiced no dissent, allowed no blackwash against his character. Perhaps she felt that if us children were mutinous to our father, the captain, the ship that was the family would sink. She walked seven paces behind him, served him before herself, nodded meekly in agreement, except when he opposed her endeavours to help the village folks and her endeavour to send m
e to school. Once or twice, after his death, she had confessed, “Life with Ah Tetia was not easy.” But she has never been so vehement before, never mouthing this absolute refusal to go with him, even if it is to the spirit world.
“Mak,” I say. “You don’t have to go with him. Robert has visited you, hasn’t he? Remember he asked you to go with him, too.”
At the mention of my brother who had been crippled all his mortal life, she smiles. He was her youngest and her favourite, the one who brought so much joy to the family whilst imprisoned in the coconut shell of his body. Every dream I had of him since his passing, was that of a handsome young man, very close in looks to Matthew, standing tall in a prefect body and perfect legs, walking as he had never walked in his lifetime on earth. And I know that Mak has dreamed of him, too, and recently, had mentioned his coming through the door, offering his hand to walk her through the next journey of her life.
“Ya juga,” she agrees. “He has asked me. Do you know he can walk now?”
“I know.”
“I’ll go with him,” she says, then she pauses. “When it’s time.”
And I know then that the time is not now. She is not ready, her task in this world is not complete. Whatever that may be. And true enough, she begins to get better. She is sitting up in bed more often. And when I cajole her, allows herself to be put into a wheelchair for her meals. The doctor had advised us to get her sitting as soon as she is able because lying down all day, her chest would cave in and might give rise to pneumonia. But she had refused every effort we made before to get her out of bed, and suddenly she became willing. What has caused this change? The few minutes turn into half an hour and the half-hour turns into an hour. The day we wheel her out of the sick-room is a triumph and I thought, maybe Bernadette is right to hang on. Agatha reinstates a holiday which she had cancelled on account of Mak’s poor condition. Our mother’s revival, in some way, does not bring the joy I thought it would bring. It seems to me that the longer she lives, the longer she has to suffer the humility of being taken cared of, because the damage and corrosion to her mind, to her perception of things, is permanent. Nothing can reverse it. And I wonder if there is any point in her living to face it all. But none of us can play God, none of us can decide for her the moment or the way she has to go.
Frog Under A Coconut Shell Page 28