::whiskey chocolates::

The year is grinding to a halt. I don't feel like working. I've got the financial provisionals to tie up, I've got a briefing document to clean up for the agency, I've got about a million phone calls to make, and I don't feel like working.

Had a really big lunch. This, despite nothing tastes the way they used to. Wilson drove us to Katong for laksa and rojak - nice escape from the 13,534th plate of poh piah or hae mee from the hawker place across the road. I ate everything. I am mechanical in dealing with my grief - I wake and dress and eat and talk with the autopilot running on full gear. I don't want to give in to my emotions, not yet; I need to be strong.

Going with Sam to my grandparents' for dinner - his first visit to my childhood home. It feels right; I regret not arranging this earlier, I regret only thinking of all these things after he's fallen ill, I regret I didn't try harder before, and took petty comfort in my childish assurance that those you love can live forever.

How wrong I was. They don't. Love can't keep Death at bay. It only makes parting harder. I had been so caught up in the siren song of my own life, my own priorities, my own demands, I neglect those who care most about me. How absurd and how pathetic.

I resolve to love everyone a little bit more. You never know when regret becomes the only residue of your love.

::peppermint creme::

We never really start to live until we believe we’re going to die. I mean, I know I’m going to die. I know I’m not immortal; one day this pallid human flesh will be withered by time and it will wear out like a cheap plastic toy. But we live most of the time as if we are sleepwalking between consciousness and subconsiouness; the golden hours of youth we spend buried in books, the salad years of adulthood are harvested in work and responsibilities, and by the time we are old enough to know better, we’re too old to do anything.

So we live and breathe like clockwood mice wound on a rusty spring, not really seeing, not really comprehending, not really engaging or attaching ourselves to anyone or anything. Sure, we have our own pockets of beliefs: from which we dig out pennies of comfort in religion, in the nape of a lover’s neck, in the first word of your child. But beyond pseudo-morality and quasi-romantic notions of life, we see tragically little. We busy ourselves with the frivolous demands of life – we fret about bills and housing and being able to afford an education; we lament government policies and curse at pop culture; we half-heartedly believe in the good of men and wait gleefully for a shoddy bit of gossip, and so we live. It’s socially necessary and politically correct, but morally empty and spiritually corrupt. Not spiritually in terms of being doctrinally-sound –I don’t buy that – but spiritually just by connecting better with our surroundings, by being slightly more human than it is required – read the bible to death if you will, but do you bother to find out the name of the lady emptying your office trash-bin every morning?

I am suddenly confronted with death, with its lingering shadow and menacing power, with its inevitability and its necessity. What do I do? No one has taught me how to deal with death, and no one will. It's one of life's most cryptic lessons, and yet we have to confront this with the limited knowledge we have.

Well. If this is the way it has to be, I will go down a fighter.

::none::

No aphrodisac. My grandfather has been given two months to live. Life's last flicker. The hourglass trickles. Is there space for a miracle? I dare not hope. Why him why him why him why us, goes the voice of emotions. Why not the homeless man on the street? Why not a condemned prisoner? Why him?

We watched him blow out the candles - there were seventy-one - on his cake last night. The deadweight of reality sunk in like the chipped rock of a heedless meteor - it was going to be his last. No more. He's going to die, and us, children and grandchildren, will watch with withering resignation, will cry, will mourn, will grief. I have such energy for tears now, such verve. It's a running tap, my emotions, and I don't know how to turn it off.

Do you tell the truth? Do you tell people that you're feeling damned at the edge of the world counting down to a loved one's death? Would they care? How do I pretend everything is normal? How do I go to bank, drink my coffee, chat with people without justifying the burden of my grief? It's effort grinding bone to dust. I can barely smile. I don't wish to smile. I want to crouch into a ball and disappear.

But that's self pity. And my old hero wouldn't want any of that. He would want us all to continue in peace and the humour that has characterised this family; he would want us to remember him in laughter and the tears of rememberance, not grief. He would want me to be strong, like him - and because I will lose him, I will keep him in memory by being the person he's always believed that I could be.

The space for miracle has already been opened - the miracle of being blessed with such a grandfather. I cannot wish for more. His suffering has diminished the quality of his life, and this life, precious as it may be to those he leaves behind, must now cease on a gentle, whispered note of love.

::truffle::

Ran into an ex classmate from art school the other day. I haven't seen her since I abandoned my brushes and oil paints for the more worldly pursuals as dictated by my father; that would have been nine years ago. She hasn't changed much, physically; I recognised the same lanky frame and bangs and the slight pale shyness that had characterised her before. Took a while to explain who I was; she couldn't remember me from the days of our childhood preoccupation.

Her voice has lost its brilliance, and mine my lustre. We are adults now. We are no longer in pigtails and the ugly pink dresses our mothers fancied in back in the 80s, splashing our childish creativity on well-sanded canvas. No. Now we paint on a different sort of canvas, armed with the still-new brushes of adulthood, still conscious of how a bad line can deformed the whole drawing, still burning with a certain flame of inspiration, but no longer honest, the way we were; no longer certain of the choice of colours and length of our strokes.

We talked for a while and there is the deep rocking regret of losing our art. We were young but stupidly passionate. We were happy to sketch a split pea in six different ways. We were excited about the prospect of new sculpting tools - 'You've still got that scar,' she suddenly remembered, of my accident with Knife No. 12 that gave me a curved, sepent-scar on my left ring finger - and we were inspired. We had a reason to wake up every day because we actually believed that our art could change the world. All of ten years old, and we were champions.

Now. Now. Now. Now we are quiet. Now we have grown up, now we have barged through that mystical door that we never imagined would be opened to us - When we grow up, said our once-brave voices, We will be artists and creators of a New Wave. Now we have. And what have we done?

She is a year away from completing her degree. "Business," she said mechanically. And after which? The long rat race down the corporate marathon. Her art? Dead. We are like war-lost soldiers, ghosts without our uniforms, occasionally resurrecting the last bit of glory for the blood-singed taste of nostalgia. Laughingly - perhaps a little forced - she admitted that she kept all her old works. Her brushes and sculpting tools are still in their boxes. So are mine. "Bit rusty now," I said. She caught my pun.

We had to say goodbye. We exchanged numbers, the way people do. We say we would keep in touch, the way people do. We wished each other the best in whatever we do, the way people do.

I don't think we would stay in touch. It's too much of a burden. It's spitting on the grave of our dreams. It's too stark too painful too uncomfortable. We have moved beyond our passion, and - we both know this - in the one way road to burying our dreams, there is no turning back.

::dark & bitter::

My Marlboro man is losing his fight. He is suffering to live; yet I cannot bear him to die. Is it selfish - the want for his presence to prolong my own sense of peace? I still make him laugh; I am one of his prized grandchildren, the most like him in character, I'm told. The one who's inherited some of his devil-may-care spirit and his irrelevant humour. "I never need to worry about you," he told me once. His faith in me had been uncompromised by my adolescent insensitivity; through the cold wars and open confrontations I had with my father he stood by me, blaming my father for iron-fisting me into a penal colony that I did not deserve. "You can't be harsh to this girl," was his mantra. In his eyes I'm the perfect granddaughter, intelligent, good-humoured, sensible. I could do no wrong; even my obstinance is to him a admirable trait of self-confidence and decisiveness.

But he will leave me one day. His tangible presence will be gone; his chair will be empty, his favourite watch unworn. Our half-drunk bottle of whiskey - his choice drink - will be served to him in front of his altar, his charisma watered down to that of a black-and-white obituary picture.

Even as I write this my heart bleeds and wrenches. Even as
I write this I know I'm not prepared for Death to do its whimiscal work of inevitability. Even as I write this I know the world is unmoved, indifferent. Even as I write this I can feel the cancer cells raging their dark battle in his worn body, raging and conquering, conquering and destroying, their ravage and rampage unstopped by modern science, the modern science that has no hold or bearing on the ancient necessity to die.

There is no right way to say goodbye. I just must.