my grandma's dead.
It caught everyone completely by surprise. From my father banging on my door at 10am ('get up and get ready, embah dah meninggal'), to the sleepless car ride to Batu Pahat ('Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye' playing on the radio), to the hothotheat of me not being used to wearing a tudung the whole day, I was on autopilot. Salam here, comfort there. I stayed away from where she was laid in the living room of my aunt's house, hiding in the kitchen. My mother didn't cry. I didn't cry then. But my heart went out to my aunt (different aunt), completely wracked with tears of guilt. My grandmother died in her house, and she was blaming herself for 'tak pandai jaga mak', to which my mother gently but sharply reminded her that no death was anyone's fault.
The house was so full of people, of relatives that I didn't even know I had, family friends that came out of the woodwork to pay their last respects, to kiss the cold cheeks of my grandmother. She wasn't a comforting grandmother. She wasn't the type to fuss over you and coddle you and silently pass you money for candy when your parents weren't looking. She was a dragon. She yelled at you for bentang-ing the tikar out wrong, or not tying your hair properly. She scoffed at the idea of me and the manmaid cooking for a doa selamat, calling it 'taik'. She played pilih kasih with her children, scarring my mother for life for the way she treated my mother (though I don't really blame her, she had 13 children). But you can't say she didn't deserve the title of 'grandmother'. Oh, she was grand. She was great. She lived for 37 years without her husband, who died in Mekah in 1970, becoming the matriarch of the family. She spent her whole life as a mother telling everyone what to do, and in her moment of death, what do you know? No one knew what to do. Her only surviving sibling, my dear embah umi, sat dazed on a chair, staring at her sister's remains, probably not believing that her 'strong' sister had died before she did. I sat with her most of the afternoon, holding her hand and trying to remind her that it was her sister underneath the kain batik, and not another Yah from one of the many branches of our family tree. My favorite theory out of all for reasons that she passed away was that it wasn't that she was tired of being alone. It was that my late grandfather was.
The only time I cried today was when at my grandma's house, waiting for my mother to pray, I stole into my grandma's room. Her bed, stacked with pillows upon pillows that she painstakingly sew herself for the many children, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren she had, looked forlorn. The permanent dent in the mattress where she slept made me snap, and I suddenly became obsessive, straightening the sheets, folding her sleeping socks, until I didn't realize that I was sobbing. My embah, the only grandparent I had left, was never going to sleep in that bed again. Was never going to yell at anyone for not stacking the pillows right. I stopped, sat on the chair, took a deep breath, and walked out of the room.
The last thing I did, was kiss her on the forehead and whisper 'I love you'. I'm going to miss you.
