First Death

I didn’t know death until I was 21.

Some might argue that I still don’t know it, the full weight of death-ness — after all, I do not know the death of a sibling, parent, or lover — but before 21, I had barely known death at all.

Before 21, I found the concept of sadness terribly romantic. Looking back, I was stupidly fortunate that I only ever knew sadness as an abstract concept rather than a lived experience. Sadness — the sort that was real, gritty, awful, physically draining — was an emotion I could merely emulate at best, and so as a child, I embraced my understanding of death with all the dramatic flair that any seven-year-old could. When my goldfish was nearing death, my parents carefully lifted him out of the fish tank with chopsticks, and placed him in a plastic tofu container filled with water. I watched, curiously, for hours as he floated on his side, his visible gill slowly opening and closing until it finally stopped. In the end, we flushed him down the toilet, and I tried my best to shed a tear. I later wrote in my diary that I felt very, very sad. Just as I had written that I felt very sad when my elderly neighbor Mr. White, whom I had never met, died. An excerpt: “Dear Diary, Boo hoo, Boo hoo. Today, I am sad.”

I skated through a few more years of life death-free, until later in grade school. I was twelve when my English teacher, Mrs. Fox, died of pneumonia, after a week of missing school from a cold. At the funeral, I tried my best to cry. I couldn’t. I was a little older, but still, I didn’t know grief. My classmates left the ceremony, eyes red, hands full of Kleenex. I privately wondered if there was something broken in my brain, or perhaps my heart. I was too removed. I lacked emotional complexity. I felt an objective sadness at most, and nothing more.

There is something chilling about the gradual progression of cancer. The disease eats away so slowly that there is no particular change from one day to the next. But one day, you’re suddenly unsure at what point the person you knew was rendered unrecognizable — was it this week, or last month, or the one before? When it happened to my uncle, my Bak Bak, a few years ago, the physical decay — although sad and eerie — was far from the worst of it. It was the absence of closure, the blatant denial throughout our extended family, and our fierce determination not to speak openly about it, that I found abnormal and deeply unsettling.

Similar to my relationships with most of my family members, I was simultaneously close and not-close with my uncle. The closeness was the kind of closeness you can only get from seeing someone once a week for twenty consecutive years. The sense of closeness you cultivate from knowing that this person saw you grow from infancy to adulthood. The kind of closeness you get when you sit beside the same person at the dinner table every time your family gets together. The kind of closeness you feel when you look at someone’s face and see features that are strikingly similar to the ones that you see on your own father’s.

The not-closeness is the kind of not-closeness you can only get when there’s a language barrier. The sense of not-closeness that is cultivated by a family who doesn’t talk openly about their problems, about their feelings. The sense of not-closeness that metastasizes when you are part of a family that pretends nothing is wrong, when things are in fact very, very wrong.

We were close, and we were not-close. And so we were there, and we were not there in the year before his death. Even after his body started losing its mass, even when he started using a cane, even when he started using a walker, he came to family dinners as if nothing was wrong. When he started losing strength in his legs, hobbling into the restaurant dozens of minutes after the rest of us, we pretended this was normal. We’d wave, pull a seat out, and continue eating and chatting like life was fine — great, even. I constantly felt uncomfortable, but didn’t know what to say. One day, as I hugged him goodbye after dinner, his entire body collapsed on mine. I supported his weight, pretending nothing had happened, just like the rest of my family.

The way we dealt with things upset me, but it wasn’t my place to intervene. I tried to change the nature of our interactions in small and subtle ways. I suggested to my parents that we make a scrapbook of memories as a Christmas gift, while Bak Bak would still be able to appreciate it. They told me no, quickly, and in hushed voices. I knew what they were thinking. Such an action would be a subtle nod to his leaving the world; it would acknowledge the worst; it would be a bad omen.

So instead, near the end, we would just visit him at his house, skin and bones disguised in oversize jeans and polo shirts that had once properly fit him, and then we would leave, my grandparents optimistically saying “he looks much better this time, compared to last.” I hated their naive optimism. I hated every minute of those visits, but also clung to them desperately, wondering if each interaction would be my last.

I will never forget the last visit. He was barely there — in and out of consciousness — but at the time I hadn’t thought it would be the last. My mom had just been diagnosed with cancer, too, so my mind — all of our minds, really — was both there, and not there. We had to compartmentalize our worries. We pretended things were normal, looking at photos of my sister’s new puppy on an iPhone. My aunt, his wife, the sweetest lady, treated it like a regular visit, offering us refrigerated cokes and cheerfully talking about the last week with my uncle as if death was not around the corner. I was amazed. How did she do it?

She walked us to the door with a smile plastered on her face. As soon as my uncle was out of earshot, her smile melted away; her face contorted. I can’t do it anymore. I just can’t. I just can’t. I just can’t. She wept and moved her arms violently, and her body shook visibly with exhaustion and grief. My mom hugged her. It was the first exchange of intimacy in our family during this whole ordeal, but it was far too late.

I went back to university and told my roommates that I’d had the worst weekend. They comforted me and I finally felt allowed to cry. I was starting to know sadness. But life went on. The next weekend I got on a plane to Chicago, visited a prospective grad school campus, wined and dined, laughed and made new friends. I came back a few days later, and just as I was starting to unpack, received the phone call from my parents. He was gone.

“Oh,” was how I responded on the phone.

I had been anticipating this moment every night for the last year, each time morbidly wondering how I would react, but now that it was happening, I was still in shock. It felt surreal. In the next hour I wavered between wanting complete solitude and desperately not wanting to be alone. In the end, I was alone. My friends were playing board games in a different neighborhood. My roommate was on a date. I sat on my bed in my closet-sized room, sending a text to my closest friend at the time. I couldn’t bring myself to even type the word ‘died’, and sent this to him instead:

me: “Got some really bad news about my uncle. Feel pretty terrible”.

friend: “Oh no! Playing board games now! We can talk about it later.”

But I wanted to talk about it now.

I hated that text, and I hated my friend that night. Had my message been that cryptic? His reply felt selfish and inconsiderate. I curled up in my bed, feeling alone, and went to sleep.

But again, life went on. I sandwiched the funeral between work and another grad school interview. The traditional Chinese funeral was one of the worst experiences of my life. We entered the room to an open casket, as well as two (or was it three?) Cantonese ceremonial singers hired to sing a dissonant, repetitive chant. They walked around in circles while singing the same song for hours on end. We took turns walking up to the casket, and I saw my grandmother weep for the first time. Normally she was cold, stone-faced, expressionless. But here, in front of the body, she kept shouting, it should have been me first. She wailed, it should have been me. I stared, horrified that this was her sentence of choice.

I watched my aunt cry for more consecutive hours than I thought were humanly possible. Her tears didn’t seem to run out. My overwhelming sadness that day was equal parts for the uncle I had lost and for the best friend my aunt had lost. But there were no speeches, no conversations, no recounting of happy memories. Just the dissonant chant, over, and over, and over again, hour after hour. And then we slept, and repeated the procedure the next day. More chanting, more crying, more grieving, no speaking, why were we always not speaking? How did this give us any closure?

And because I was simultaneously close and not-close with my uncle, close and not-close with my extended family, I continued to feel uneasy for months (years) after the funeral. Coping with this uneasiness manifested in strange ways. At some point last year, I developed a habit of watching a segment of Sesame Street in which Big Bird learns about death for the first time. He asks innocent questions, but questions that the wisest of adults grapple with when grieving nonetheless. The segment is poignant and cathartic, and I would watch it obsessively for weeks on my phone before falling asleep.

There’s a point in the video where Big Bird finally grasps that his friend Mr. Hooper has died, and won’t come back. He comes to terms with the idea that life must continue. He is comforted by the fact that he has wonderful memories of Mr. Hooper. Still, he can’t help but quietly utter, “But I don’t like it. It makes me sad.”

Me too, Big Bird. It makes me sad too.

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