Story: A Moment Of Forever

Death comes in many ways, some more polite than others. In its first visitation to me, for example, it did me the courtesy of a telephone call. I was 14, my sister 13, and it was six in the morning when the telephone rang, a summons from Death in the calm, clear, and concise instructions of my mother. We were to skip school that day - already then an occasion associated with dread - and go to the hospital immediately. My grandfather had been found dead mid-route of his daily jog, attacked and murdered by his own vagrant heart.

That, however, was not my introduction to the place where life begins and so often ends. Two months earlier, a massive stroke had stolen half of my grandmother's body, and as I sat once again two months later in the limbo of the hospital's waiting room, I surprised myself with the ability to appreciate the irony that my grandmother slept seven floors above, survivor of her latter dissolute yearsm while my health-conscious grandfather reposed eight floors below her, felled by a single severe spasm of chance. Of course, my grandmother did not survive her husband long. A wild confrontation with my father led a relapse, and six lingering months later she gave up the remaining half of her body.

So many visitation in the space of less than a year, but the swing of the sickle was not yet complete. Two weeks after my grandmother's death, my emaciated uncle, my father's sole brother and remaining kin, announced that he would not return to Canada, where he had made his new life. He would, with his Canadian wife and child, remain in Singapore - for chemotherapy.

Imagine then, our family in the seemingly endless moment of grief. My father, who bore each blow and cried only once, in sympathy with my grandmother. My sister, who cried twice and never again, and who quickly became my father's silent partner in this series of unfortunate events. My mother, whose own parents had died decades ago and who now haggled over peanuts and mineral water with two clear and hard eyes, who now booked the funeral home and hearses and cremation timeslots. And then there was me.

I had not cried when my grandfather died. My eyes were again dammed when my grandmother followed suit, and when my uncle eventually succumbed, defeated, a wreckage of melted flesh and tubes. Why don't you cry, my sister asked me once. I told her I didn't know. That, of course, was only a half-truth.

See me now, wandering the precise corridors of the hospital, victim of the illness called a week of compassionate absence. Now blink, and there I am, sitting beside my grandmother, looking at her lain on her side to encourage blood circulation, listening to her thin reedy voice plead for a sip of water, moistening her fractured lips because any more would only dribble out of the corner of her mouth, thinking the frighteningly normal thought that her death would mean freedom from this eternity, and not only for me.

Even before that year of deaths slow and sudden had begun, I had already died a little. Death, after all, comes in many ways, and the living may not be completely alive.