He Was Really Sick but I Didn’t Know How To Help Him

I heard the rattling of the front gate first. The padlock banged against the gate, clanging in an urgent way. I looked up from my reading in the living room and there you were, standing out there like a ghost from my past, waving at me and calling my name.

My heart caught in my throat and my chest tightened. What do I do? I was all alone in the house and I wasn’t sure I wanted to let you in. You were not supposed to be here. You called my name again, reluctantly I unlocked the gate.

“Hey!” I said nervously. “How come you’re here? Did your family come back for a visit?”

“Oh no, I came back by myself.”

“Oh?” Then I saw the scrapes on your legs and arm. The blood still looked wet and the red alarmed me more than your presence. “Ted, what’s up with your arm and legs?!”

“Oh, this?? It’s nothing. I jumped off from the bus.” You said as a matter of fact.

“Wait, you jumped off from a bus?”

“I asked the bus driver to stop but he didn’t listen, so I got up and jumped off,” you said casually with a shrug.

“You jumped off a moving bus … it could have killed you! Are you hurt badly?”

“Nah. I’m fine.”

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I couldn’t help but keep staring at you, trying to digest what you had just said. I wanted to say to you, “Normal people don’t jump off the bus, Ted.” but I couldn’t.

Because, well, you are not normal. And we had never talked about your condition.

“I went and saw May.” You told me quietly.

Another knot formed in my throat.

“How is she?” I asked.

“She didn’t look too well. She looked so tired, and skinny.”

“Well, she is pregnant. Being pregnant can be tiring.” I tried to comfort you.

“I don’t think she’s happy. I can tell that she still loves me. She just couldn’t tell me.”

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I didn’t know what else to say. She’s married and she’s pregnant with another man’s child. Wake up buddy, time to move on.

If it were three years ago I could have, would have said it to you. Three years ago you were still the same boy who had moved into the neighborhood when we were in second grade, a boy I played games with and raced to see who could bike the fastest, a boy who talked and laughed easily with me, a boy who grew up with me.

But now? You talked incessantly and obsessively about your first love, fast without intermissions. There was a glint of madness in your eyes that I didn’t recognize.

I couldn’t say anything to you.

I listened to your jumbled talk. Your speech was a reflection of how your brain worked — it fired erratic arrays of thoughts rapidly and aimlessly, with no purpose or destination. You went where your brain took you.

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How did the conversation end? I don’t remember now. All I remember was the alarm and sorrow.

You didn’t stay long. Perhaps you sensed my nervousness.

Perhaps you knew someone in the neighborhood had seen you and was calling your family in the city two and a half hours away.

Your brother might be getting in the car now, coming to get you home. Once they got you, they would lecture you and the doctor would give you heavier medication. The medication you loathed and secretly threw away.

It wasn’t the first time you had done that, running away from home and coming back to where you began, a place where it all started. Like a dog returns to its vomit, you were stuck in a behavior you couldn’t break out of.

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The people in our small village blamed the girl’s mother.

May lived across from your house, two houses down from mine. We biked to school together and hung out often. Something had grown and blossomed among you two. It was happening right under my nose but I was still naïve and thus oblivious.

Until one day, May took me aside and told me gently you two wanted to be alone. It felt like someone had slapped me, my face felt stinging hot and was vibrating with embarrassment. I had been the third wheel the whole time and I didn’t know it. From that day on I dropped out of our trio group.

But puppy love often comes with a dramatic plot twist. May’s mother found out about the romance. She marched right up to your mother and simply demanded this all be put to a stop. You were forbidden to see each other. You were devastated.

“We really love each other, we do. Why did she do this to us?”

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There was no quietly sneaking around behind May’s mother’s back. May had nine siblings and her mother set a few sisters following her, watching her, and guarding her all the time. She wasn’t allowed to talk on the phone or go anywhere alone.

But love always finds a way.

Your upstairs bedroom window faced her parents’ upstairs bedroom window. If you stood in front of the window and she stood there, you were able to catch a glimpse of each other.

I could see it in my mind now, how you two pantomimed to each other, your bodies’ movements big and fluid like a dance. A dance of undying love and longing.

A forbidden dance of youth.

The air between the houses bristled and crackled with the intense electricity of desire.

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It worked until the sisters snitched on May. May’s mother, in a rage boarded up the windows. With each nail she hammered in, she pounded in the nails on the coffin of your relationship.

In there lay May’s love and dreams.

Every time I biked past the house, I stared at the boarded windows in disbelief, feeling like I was living in some sort of cheap soap opera, and my friends had been made unwillingly into the tragic protagonists.

How strange life was.

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May had no choice but to move on, leaving you behind.

That was when things started breaking down. You started skipping school. Your obsession with May took on a scary turn. You couldn’t stop calling her house, talking about her, or attempting to follow her. You had outbursts of emotions. You would leave home, wander and your family wouldn’t know where were you.

The villagers started whispering.

The whisper spread from the south in our little village into the north end of the town. With each inching and crawling the cancerous tumor of gossip grew larger and further stretched its veins. The murmur grew louder and louder until it turned into a deafening clanging of cymbals we used in waking up the lions to dance on Chinese New Year to uncontainable joy; but this was to announce a death — the death of a sane son in your family.

The lions had woken up to destroy and devour.

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Your sister came to me and begged, “Please talk to him. He doesn't want to sit for the secondary school national examination. He always treasures your insight. Please talk to him.”

I knew that without sitting for the examination, your future would be dead. Without it, you couldn’t go to any university. You had such a brilliant mind, always one step ahead of me in mathematics. I tried to reach you.

Despite everything, I still entertained the hope of your condition being only a temporary mental breakdown, you would get over your heartbreak and you would get better. You would move on and life would be back to normal.

I reasoned, I begged, I cajoled, I even threatened and called you an idiot, for not seeing sense and for throwing away your whole life for a girl. You were adamant, that you would not waste time going to school.

One of the reasons May’s mother objected to your relationship was because your family was poor. You would work to gain her trust and respect. You would prove her wrong and get May back.

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You became uncontainable and unpredictable. You had more outbursts until your mother and sister couldn’t manage you anymore. Your mother came out very little then, fearing the eyes of the keen observers and the whispering that started as soon as she turned her back. Your friends stopped coming.

Your older siblings who were working and living in another city came back and had a family meeting. They reached a unanimous decision to move the whole family away quietly.

Did anyone come and say goodbye to you? I wouldn’t know as I was living in another city then, studying hard to get into a public university. I was surprised to find your house empty when I came back. The house, dark at night, served a stark contrast to the whole row of houses that lit up next to it, signaling something was broken in our community; but everyone was conditioned to turn their eyes away from it.

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Why am I telling you this now, Ted? This is turning out to be a long letter that I didn’t intend to write. But I feel like I owe you this. A touch of fall has arrived and I can feel it because I feel like weeping whenever I think of you. We have buried this way too long, shouldn’t we let it come out into the daylight?

Looking back, maybe we should have seen it coming.

Losing May was not the making of you, it was only the unraveling.

We should have seen it in your father.

Your father whom we always found sitting on the dark staircase in your house. His face, in the shadow, and his eyes, a distant, faraway look. He looked out the front door and would sit there for hours, quiet. He never wore a shirt and was always in his black shorts. His white wiry hair grew long and wild and his fingernails long, gnarled, and yellow.

He held a cigarette between his fingers and he seemed to be forever shrouded in the smoke or the clouds of his dark moods. He never smiled at us and was prone to outbursts at unpredictable times. I remember his cold gaze, and how he always seemed to exist in a different world, unseen to our earthly eyes.

Why didn’t we ever talk about him, Ted?

Maybe if we were able to talk about him, we would be able to talk about your condition. Maybe if it wasn’t something that shouldn’t pass our lips, you could have been more open and honest about your feelings and thoughts when they first started.

Your father shouldn’t have been a taboo, the elephant in the room.

You shouldn’t have felt like you were inferior, a laughing stock or a hideous creature to be stared at.

We were taught to fear people like you, but now I realize it was this society’s pernicious thinking that keeps the fear alive.

Whom should we be afraid of? The one who was cast out because he was trapped in his mind, or the one who cast him out because he couldn’t conform to our society’s standard?

I ask so many questions now, Ted.

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Remember the family who lived five doors down from your house?

They kept to themselves. But we all knew he had a brother who lived alone in the Malay village nearby. He wore mismatched clothes, had unwashed long hair that he tied into a long braid, and walked around carrying a big umbrella strapped to his back that he never used. He was always smiling and talking to himself.

We would often find him unexpectedly all around the town as if he could teleport. You could always tell when you came upon the vicinity of where he lived in the village by the bizarre things hanging on the trees leading to the house.

The boys in our school nicknamed him “Wong Fei-hung”, a folk hero made famous by Jet Li, who had a long braid and often fought with an umbrella. It was also for his adept skills of climbing, or perhaps the art of lightness where one could walk in the air. Because some trees were so high up we couldn’t figure out how he could have achieved it unless he was a kung fu master secretly.

One time he hung some fruits and eggs in a plastic bag onto a power line pole on our street. The bag hung on that pole for days on end but no one seemed to care to take it down, despite the rotten smell and juice dripping down from it.

The bizarre sight was a constant reminder of the obvious but unspoken illness living among us, yet no one dared approach it or cared to even acknowledge it.

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I went back to our hometown this summer after being away for nine years, Ted.

The hundred-year-old trees that we used to bike through under its massive long arms were no longer there. They cut them down to make way for wide expressways. Everything seemed so crowded and our town seemed to be trapped in a squared box of rows and rows of newly built buildings.

So many things have changed yet everything seemed unchanged.

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I don’t know where Wong Fei-hung is now and no one else seems to know. His brother had moved away. And you are not around anymore, Ted.

You are six feet under, in a graveyard near the city where you lived after our town drove your family out with whispering words.

I heard the news from my sister. Your sister had married my sister’s brother-in-law. Your family was destined to be forever tied to this town.

You died of Covid. In 2021.

You were living by yourself then, you got a job in a factory. You went to see your mom every day. But one day you didn’t come, they found out you were sick, and then you passed.

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Were you lonely when you passed, Ted? Were you scared? Were you relieved at the end that you didn’t have to tolerate this cruel world anymore?

The news is one of your older brothers has had a few episodes of mental breakdown over the years as well. He is on medication. Your father had gone long before you.

I thought about you often, Ted.

I thought about how we could have done better. I thought of the shame your family carried that they didn’t need to. Your entire life was twisted and squashed because our society didn’t understand mental illness and didn’t know how to help you. People didn’t seem to want to talk about you, except to gossip.

But I won’t stop talking about you, Ted. I picked up my phone and texted one of our old mutual friends after hearing about you.

“Do you remember Ted?”

I want to talk about this, I want to write about you.

We still have so much to learn about mental illness and how to make the world safe for people like you. I won’t let them forget you, Ted.

This is for you.

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