Love And Loss In The Prime Of Your Life

The poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, famously said “Tis better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all.” Now I don’t know the first thing about romance and I’ll gladly admit that, so if that’s what you’re looking for, now’s the time to turn back. For those of you still reading on, allow me to tell you what I do know: Love and Loss.

Let’s start off with love. I can say that I’ve had a lot of it and have been blessed to have known it from the very beginning of my life. I was the youngest child in a family of three siblings and the last of eighteen grandchildren. I was born to slightly older parents and for many years, I was the only actual child in my extended family. In fact, I did not spend any considerable time with a person my age until I started school. Growing up in an Asian family where everybody lived close-by and were expected to meet regularly, I spent the most time with my parents and my grandmother. It was through them that I felt love most strongly and most often. As those years flew by, their love for me grew and changed, almost in perfect sync to my growth and changing perceptions of life. I’ve been able to put these changes into four distinct phases.

• As a small child, love was outings, games and food. My earliest memories included the many trips to the beach that the entire family went on, the mountain of toys that I played with my parents at home and the fragrant aromas of all manner of food that bombarded my young nostrils every weekend at my grandma’s house. The fact that I was never alone, always entertained and was able to enjoy all kinds of delicious food was at the time, the pinnacle of love.
• In Primary School, time and presence was what I felt was the ultimate form of love. As my mother had been a housewife and my father retired by the time I was four, I gained the envy of my peers for being the only kid whose parents were constantly around. Throughout those six years, my mum and dad never missed a single sports day, school play or parent-teacher meeting and were always there to send me to and from school. My parents were also more than happy to extend their time to my friends by giving them lifts home or babysitting if their parents worked late. This generosity also extended to my grandma who offered an open invitation to all my friends for whatever functions were going at her house. This was when I first understood that not everyone is lucky to feel love as strongly if at all and this made me all the more grateful for the love I had.
• In High School, love was patience, space and compromise. As with most teenagers, High School was a complicated time to say the least. Being “cool” and (unsuccessfully) impressing my peers seemed to be the top priority of the day and believe me, my priorities could not have been any more mixed up. First went my grades, then my motivation and soon after, my self esteem. I projected my own feelings of self-doubt on those closest to me. Being the difficult teenager I was, I couldn’t blame them if they lashed back at me in frustration but they didn’t. Instead they offered suggestions and brutally unfiltered criticism of my behavior when necessary. At the same time, they gave me privacy and space to reflect as well as the opportunity to speak my mind. Thanks to this, I was able to get myself out of this slump, get back into the swing of things and look forward to whatever lay ahead of me. Throughout these five years, I understood that love could be as much a firm hand as it was a gentle touch. Looking back, there’ll always be a part of me that wishes I could have done things differently but this has made me all the more grateful for the love I was shown at a time where I may not have deserved it as much.
• By the time I started College, the doubts and insecurities that plagued me in High School had been long gone. I had the next few years of my life mapped out, a good group of friends and a feeling of motivation that I haven’t felt in years. Through it all, the love I felt from those closest to me continued to grow and change as it always had. In fact, the love I felt was never stronger before this point. It was the one constant in a time where things could change on a dime, it was the one familiar thing in a time where everyday offered something new and it was that one reminder that no matter how self-assured you could be, you could never get tired of an “I’m proud of you” from the people who were with you since day one.

That was love. It was that magical thing that picked me up when I was down, propped me up as I stood and was ready to stand by me as I strove for new heights. No matter what else was going on around me, the world was always a beautiful place thanks to the people I had with me and the love which I was sure would continue to grow and grow as it always had all this while. In fact, I was looking forward to this continued love and support as I inched closer toward what many may consider the true beginning of life, my eighteenth birthday. Little did I know, I was in for one rude awakening.

The love shown to me by my family was like air being blown into a balloon. The longer you keep filling it with air, the bigger it gets and you’re so caught up in watching it grow that you forget something very important. A balloon is always at its biggest just before it pops. While I was prepared for more love to fill up the balloon that was my life, I did not in a million years expect that balloon to pop so soon. Now that I think about it, “pop” would be a gross understatement. It was more like an explosion, one fueled by love and leaving one thing behind: Loss, something I too have begun to know all too well. How did I become so unfortunately acquainted with loss, you ask? Allow me to explain.

A few months after I turned eighteen, my mother became very ill. We received the news that nobody ever wanted to hear, she had cancer and it was terminal. The doctors gave her a year to eighteen months at the most. She passed away in forty days. In these forty days she lost the ability to eat, speak and move. I could see why people compared chemotherapy to a napalm bomb. It kills everything inside you indiscriminately in the hopes that it gets the bad stuff. My mum knew the price she’d had to pay and the odds she was up against but true to form, she pushed through. While her body eventually gave out, her heart and mind fought on till the end. I held her hand as she passed away. It was the strangest sensation, feeling someone’s life leave their body. I found myself crippled by a sadness so strong that my body could not express it. I just stood there with an expression as blank as my mind was. When we had to leave the ward, for the doctors to do their checks, I sat silently in a gloomy corridor with my father. He put his arm around me and told me that we still had each other. A tear rolled down in his cheek and that was the first of two times I saw my father cry. Unfortunately, we could not sit and grieve for long. In our culture, funerals take place the same day a person dies so we had to keep moving. By the time it was all over, I was exhausted. I had been up for over a day and a half and had been up and down from place to place. The immediate loss I felt surprisingly went as quickly as it came. Perhaps it was because I was prepared for this moment or because I could no longer bear to see someone I loved in such agony, I accepted the fact rather quickly that this was it. I would never see my mother again.

The next morning however, brought with it a much stronger feeling. It was the first day of university and given the circumstances, I had every reason to stay home. When I got up though, the realisation of the magnitude of my loss set in and I could not bear to stay in bed or even in the house, where I was constantly surrounded by memories. I had to escape and went to my first day of class as scheduled. For a brief few hours, the world felt normal again but when it came time to go home, it would all come crashing back down on me. It was times like those that made me all the more grateful for the people I had left, especially my dad and grandma.

After my mum’s death, my grandma was an especially comforting presence during this time. Whatever time I had not spent in class or asleep in bed was spent at her house. If a person was meant to get wiser with age, she would be the wisest person I’ve ever known. Kidding aside, her very presence alone always seemed to fill me with the most comforting sense of warmth. Her wrinkled hands effortlessly removed the heavy sorrow I carried with me every time she reached for a hug and most of all, her words and her way of saying things never failed to soothe and reassure me when I needed it. I still remember those quiet, blissful afternoons sitting at her dining table with my dad as we listened to her regale us with stories of her past. For every experience I had, be it good or bad, she always had a story to tell and a lesson to be learnt from it. She brought a sense of calm and serenity to us in a time where we needed it the most and fixed us when we were at our most broken. I looked forward to those visits even though they had grown to be an almost daily affair as it was the first thing I found genuine fulfilment out of doing since my mum’s passing. When the pandemic hit and lockdown began, the sudden inability to make that twenty drive over to my grandma’s house was the first thing I truly missed doing. Through her I learned that although loss is something painful, it is also what brings those affected by that loss closer together. I could honestly say that had it not been for our daily talks, neither I nor my dad could even fathom the idea of getting back on with our lives.

Just like that, three years flew by. Lockdowns aside, life seemed to be falling back into place. I was doing all right in (virtual) class and had a good circle of friends around me while calm and joy slowly but surely returned home. I found myself a new balloon and it began to fill again with air. Then it happened again, *pop*. It was a lazy Saturday night at about eleven, when my dad received the call from my aunt. My grandma had taken her regular nap before dinner but when it came time to wake her up, she just couldn’t seem to be roused from her sleep. By that time, she was already rushed to the hospital and dad dropped everything to go as well. I had no choice but to stay home due to Covid restrictions and was burdened by the helplessness of being unable to do anything. By the time dad got to the hospital, the doctors were able to find out what was wrong with my grandma and wake her up again. Unfortunately, the good news ended there. They found a mass in her brain that had caused her to suffer a stroke and at her age, any further treatment could only do more harm than good. We were advised to take her back home and keep her comfortable as she quietly slipped away into a blissful sleep where she passed away, warm in her bed just under three weeks later.

The loss felt different this time, not any less impactful but different. At the time of her passing, my grandma was a few short years shy of a century and death was something she often candidly spoke about. In a way, those many talks and the fact that she was already as old as she was seemed to prepare us perfectly for that fateful day. However, the days that followed were a different story. A real sense of emptiness set in each time I continued my routine of going over to her house. Although it was a large, crowded house with people and pets continuously bustling about, I could still feel a huge void. Gone were the warmest, most loving hugs I ever felt, the familiar sound of her cane and jewellery rattling as she walked about or the constant reminders to be safe on the way back. Sitting at the packed dining table with a noticeably empty chair beside me, I noticed a familiar look in my dad’s eyes. A look I only saw in one other person before: Me. I guess it goes to show that no matter how old you are or how foreseeable circumstances may have been, you’re always going to miss your mum.

Although the loss of my mother and grandma were without a doubt painful, the gratitude that I had for still having my dad and for the unconditional love he showed me was far greater. Even among my three favourite people my dad was the person I was closest to. In fact, nobody in the world was as close to me as my father. Although he was an older man, he had a youthful presence about him that made him very approachable. There were no secrets between us but yet I never felt intruded upon. In fact, I felt most comfortable confiding in him. We did everything together from going out, watching tv, eating and playing video games (where embarrassingly enough he was better). We also went through our fair share of loss together. But regardless, good or bad we always had each other and that’s the way it was going to be from now on. To think that all changed, just three months later.

On an uneventful Wednesday night, just before we normally went to sleep. Dad came into my room, complaining that he was not feeling well. As I also have, my dad suffered from asthma and told me that he did not feel his inhalers kicking in. I asked if he was in any pain and he said no but we decided that it would be best to call an ambulance. In our minds, the paramedics would come, give him slightly stronger medication to ease his breathing and we’d get on with our night. There was no panic or hysteria as one normally expects when calling for an ambulance. Instead, we returned to my dad’s room, sat down at the edge of his bed and took turns explaining the situation. Just a split second later though, he slowly slumped into my arms almost as if he had drifted off to sleep. For the briefest of moments, I foolishly thought that he was trying to make himself more comfortable. How wrong I was. He had stopped breathing and began to grow pale in my arms. I frantically made this known to the lady on the line and was instructed to lay my dad on the floor and administer CPR. The seven minutes or so it took for the paramedics to get here felt like an absolute eternity as I tried simply to focus on what I was being told to do. While the paramedics worked on him, I called up my siblings, aunts and uncle’s who came rushing to the house. But by the time they had arrived, the paramedics gave us the news that I never wanted to hear. My dad had suffered a massive heart attack that took his life within minutes. Never in a million years did I ever think I’d have someone dying in my arms, let alone my father. Never did I think that by twenty-one, I would have lost both my parents and grandmother so soon from one another. As it had been with my mother’s and grandmother’s passing, I did not cry. This wasn’t because I was tough or strong or trying to mask my emotions but because I just could not bring myself to display the unbearable sadness of what had happened. Inside, I was a wreck. A distraught, lost, wailing little boy crying out for Mum and Dad.

As we did with my mother and grandmother, we buried my father a few hours later. As I helped to clean his body and bring him into the grave, I was in a daze. My mind could not compute how it was possible that just twenty four hours prior to this, we were sitting in front of the tv, eating breakfast together and now here I was shoveling dirt into a six foot hole where he was lying in, never to rise again. I spent the next few days staying with my sister and her family who lived nearby before returning home the following week. After having gone through such a thing twice before, I was ready to be bombarded by the noticeable emptiness that came with my dad no longer being there. Strangely that did not happen. For some reason, in my mind it felt as if he had simply gone out and had yet to return. It did not sink in that I had lost my rock, my confidante and my best friend. I found myself instinctually looking out the window to see if he had pulled over at our driveway. I’d go to his room whenever I wanted to show him something and at night in bed, I waited for my door to open and hear his familiar “good night, I love you.” For those few minutes, everything felt normal and then the crushing realisation of what happened that night being real, hit me. The first few weeks were especially difficult but I have begun trying to pick up the pieces.

When I started college, people always asked what I wanted in life. It was very easy to answer that. I already had everything I could ever want and that was the unconditional love of my family. All I can do now is to make sure I work hard to repay those same people. I never got that chance. It felt as if I was denied the chance to even try to achieve my vision of life or to accomplish the goals I had set out to achieve. It felt that my life from this point onwards would be defined by unspeakable loss and emptiness.

Then, I came upon a realisation. For me to have felt such loss and to miss someone so much, I must have felt a love so strong from them that I could no longer feel whole without it and should I not be grateful for even being able to have felt that love in the first place? To think that the only way to not feel loss was to never feel love in the first place. To me that was true emptiness. I can’t escape the loss I feel now so instead of running from it, I carry it with me as a reminder of the love I was once so blessed to have had. It was this realisation that has spurred me to keep pushing on to find a new direction. Over the past few years, I have grieved far more and far longer than any of my peers but as Queen Elizabeth said, “grief is the price we pay for love.” It was indeed a high price but one I realised I would gladly pay again.

I write this piece to you sitting alone in a quiet house, surrounded by memories of far noisier days with those who made this place a home. Despite this, I am filled with a sense of peace. Although my balloons have popped, nothing will ever take away the air that filled them. For those of you who feel the emptiness of no longer having your loved ones there when you graduate, get a job, get married, have kids and grow old, I leave you with this quote: “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.”