Grief At First, At Last

Reading Robin Robertson’s elegy for his father “A Show of Signs” I recognised the evocation of grief like a punch in the stomach.

The fourth stanza carries particular resonance:

Death is first absence, then a presence

Of the dead amongst the living:

The kick of grief like a turning fin, that whelms

But cannot break the surface.

The word “whelms” fills your mouth. If I was to teach this poem, I would say to the students: feel this word in your mouth, see how you have to slow down when you say it, experience this slowing down as part of the jerky rhythm of the line. It is a word that seems to overwhelm the mouth, like the grief overwhelming the poet. Sound embodying meaning: onomatopoeia.

The first two lines relate the experience of loss that anyone who has ever lost a relative, a friend or a lover can identify with. The dead is forever gone, no longer present among the living. Yet he or she is also, very soon, present. Through the memories that cling on; snapshots from the past; the recalled voice or laugh; the vanished smile.

The image of grief in the other two lines is an image of a fish’s fin turning underwater and everything under its arch is submerged. This is the force of grief: it has a “kick” that does not break through to air, an inward-turning, disabling force.

What happens to grief over time? It is felt less as a “kick”, more like something banal assimilated into the everyday, of a piece with the mundane. It will appear to have disappeared. Life will appear to have gone on, the living will appear to have moved on.

But make no mistake: the absence of the dead person has become “presence,” altering the lives of the grieving persons left behind. “The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything,” writes CS Lewis after the death of his wife in A Grief Observed.

Life does go on, but so does grief. Grief does not end. Who I am after Boon’s death is distinct from who I was before. Have I not lost others through death before? Yes. My great grandmother – when I was eight. Her health had been failing over a long period of time. A much-loved colleague at the school – a sudden unexpected loss. But not this close – not a lover.

A friend of Boon’s, CC, was on his way to Korea when he heard about Boon. He flew back to Singapore instead, together with his wife, and they came straight to the hospital from the airport. Both of them spent a lot of time comforting me and Boon’s mom as we sat and waited in the corridor. CC said to me during one of those afternoon vigils: this will be a turning point for you. Nothing will be the same again. I took it to mean, that when Boon recovers and is discharged, everything in our lives will have to change. Why of course, I thought. I never thought he would not wake up again. If the thought came to me, I rejected it.

Now CC’s words can be understood in terms of Boon’s presence in my life as an absence. By presence I do not mean that grieving for him consumes my life. No, not that. Presence in terms of remembering who he was, what a great guy he was, how bloody annoying he could be sometimes about cleanliness, and how obsessive he was about keeping records, filing old emails, keeping post-it note pads in the car.

Presence in terms of not pushing away fragments of him that surface from time to time. Like this morning. Waking up and seeming to hear his voice. It made me sad, but it also made me smile as I forced myself to get out of bed and make the first bitter cup of espresso. Good morning. I remember the sound of his voice. Good.

Grief becomes part of the living’s understanding of who he or she is after the death of the loved one. Like love, it does not come to a full stop when the loved one stops breathing. Don’t we continue to miss the things we have lost after we lose them? I lost an umbrella in 2011 that I had owned and used since I was 18 and I still think of it sometimes.

(An umbrella, Wei! Get a grip! – Actually . . . I lie when I say that I think of it sometimes. I think of it very, very often.)

The last date in the journal started on October 7:  November 12, same year, 2012. That was the day after what would have been Boon’s 35^th birthday if he had still been alive on November 11, 2012. On the bus to work today I re-read what I wrote yesterday and I had to get the tissue out. Grief kicks and whelms me.

As long as we love, we continue to grieve. Because of love, we cherish our grief, we take care of it, we allow it to take its rightful place in our hearts. It can reside there, truthfully, legitimately, with a name.

The presence of absence can also refer to that less than clear-cut divide between the living and the dead at the earlier stages of mourning. The living may continue to discover things about the dead, and their relationship may seem to the living to continue to evolve because of the newly attained knowledge about the dead person. “Why didn’t you tell me …” “I had no idea she was good at …” New sides of the person are uncovered, and even though the person is no longer around, the living grow in their understanding of the dead. New insight nurtures the relationship, adding new layers to it, albeit unilaterally.

This is why some people continue to speak to the dead. They speak out loud, as if the person is there. They tell the dead how their day was, what they had for lunch, who they saw at church. It sounds rather theatrical, doesn’t it? Well, I went through it, and when I talked to Boon in this fashion for a few weeks after his death, I did not feel like I was acting. I did not think, oh no, I have truly lost it. No – talking to Boon felt like the most natural thing in the world to be doing. But there also came a time when these one-way conversations stopped. I cannot remember why or how. And the nightly dreams of Boon – after a while, they too stopped. The dream last night was the first one I have had since March.

(to be continued)

From the Journal ~ October 14, 2012

October 14, 2012

Boon my darling,

Your blood pressure and heart rate descended from 6.30 a.m. to around 10 when Dr. S came out to the corridor to speak to your mother and me. I had woken up at 5.30, feeling an urgency to rush to the hospital, but also a strange calm. I prayed and flipped through the Bible and was led to Daniel 6. Daniel's miraculous survival in the den of lions. Darius' witness and proclamation of God. How my eyes opened! I recorded a reading of this chapter for you. And as S and I suggested, I personalised it for you. Oh Boon, I don't know why, but the  God sending angels to close the mouths of lions -- what is disease and physical infirmity to him?

On the way to SGH I looked up the lyrics of "What A Friend We have In Jesus" and I sang a bit of it as I walked, because I thought I could record it for you. But later on, when I was in your room, after I played the Daniel recording for you, I sang you the song. Did you hear me? It has long been one of my favourite faith songs. All my sins and griefs to bear.

"What a friend we have in Jesus
All our sins and griefs to bear
What a privilege to carry
Everything to God in prayer."

--------

I am at A's flat in Buangkok. I hope you are not looking for me at the Batu flat. I should be back there tomorrow. You have left your body. I saw the shell today. When did you leave?

11.40 p.m.

---------

When I put the earphones on you this morning, I thought there was something different. And when I sang to you, I felt it again. I was staring at your face the whole time. It seemed to me that there was something different about you; you did not seem to be there.

I don't know why but I turned to look at the foot of your bed where there was nothing except for the machines. When I prayed for you and I held your hand, there was something different, though I could not say what it was exactly.

Did I turn to look at the foot of your bed because your soul had left your broken body, like a snake sheds its old skin, and was standing there, looking at it, trying to take this in, like me?

---------

We are our bodies -- and more. The body is just a shell. A precious and beautiful shell individually made for each one of us so that no two bodies are ever the same.

Why did your shell give up?

(to be continued)

The Heart

According to movies, pop songs, poems, novels, plays, the heart is an organ that can ache to the point of breaking. See Ophelia. See Romeo and Juliet. It can also be an index of excitement, elation. At the nearness of the beloved, the heart starts to race, the heartbeat increasing dramatically. When I first encountered courtly lyric poetry of the European middle ages, I was amused to find that the symptoms of desire and infatuation were as physical back in the 1200’s as they were in the 1990’s. The male poet might speak of a great physical discomfort in the left side, sometimes even to the point of trembling violently when he is in the presence of the invariably perfect and unattainable beloved.

The heart was wordplay until a time in my mid-twenties when my first significant romantic relationship ended. In the middle of an uncontrollable crying fit in my bedroom, I suddenly felt a twinge in the left side of my chest. I got up and drew the curtains. It was summer and the light was golden. I could hear laughter and voices, probably my neighbours and their children enjoying the sun in their back garden. But I was consumed first by my pain and then by this sudden physical manifestation of the emotional tumult inside of me. It astonished me, the sharpness of the jab and where I felt it. It surprised me to learn that that the love songs and love poems I had studied were not figurative: unhappiness can cause the heart such strain and duress.

 
After Boon’s collapse, all this trafficking in metaphors and analogies seemed to be irrelevant and useless when placed next to the analyses of the heart, its functions and its ailments furnished by the medical professionals who spoke to me or that I searched and found on the internet. Translated into my layperson’s understanding, this is what I learnt:
 

The heart is a pump, the engine that gets blood to move around the body, powering the work of the other organs. When the heart stops pumping, oxygen can’t be transported via the bloodstream; without oxygen, other parts of the body cannot function.

 

The brain is the main command centre. When the brain can’t function properly, even if the ears can hear a simple instruction like “Move your fingers if you can hear me,” the fingers will not move. Nothing will happen because the command centre has shut down. Brain damage sets in 3 minutes after the heart has stopped.

 

After an attack, the heart can be resuscitated using CPR (Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation). To prevent damage to the other organs, CPR has to be immediately rendered. Without CPR or other forms of intervention, the stopping of the heart leads to death within 10 minutes.

I searched for diagrams of the heart on the internet and I learnt that the average size of an adult human heart is the size of a fist. The average weight is 300g. There are four chambers inside the heart. The ones upstairs are called atria and they receive the blood that flows back into the heart. The ones downstairs are called ventricles and they move the blood out of the heart to other parts of the body.

The images that came to mind:

 
Chambers are rooms. A fist is a hand that is closed, a fist formed when the fingers are curled into a ball. Clench and unclench the fist and there is movement in the hand and wrist. A heart that has stopped is a frozen fist. A heart that has stopped is a building where the light has gone out in some or all of the rooms.

The questions that also came:

Why would the heart of a healthy person suddenly stop? Was it too laden with care? Too weary to continue with the tiresome tiring business of living?  Was the person, in spite of all appearances, heartbroken in some deep irreparable way?

So it was back to psychological hypothesizing, a spiral of why’s and what if’s.

For the answers that medical science could be relied upon to provide talked about Boon as a physiological entity, not the whole person who had a personality with lovable and annoying traits, someone with his own unique laundry list of likes and peeves, his talents, his strengths and weaknesses, his propensity to nag and whine, his kindness, his experiences of hope, loss, rejection, disappointment, love.

In the map of Boon that the doctors drew, there was an organ that had stopped, other organs that began to fail, a body that was beginning to fail. But I had a different map of Boon. Where was his soul in their map? The soul that could not be registered on the screens of the machines that surrounded the island of his bed in the ICU. The soul that could not be drawn like the blood and sent for tests.

What happens to the soul when the body begins to become uninhabitable? Is the soul not connected to the heart? The medieval poets who wrote about the physical violent symptoms of love and desire were not writing about bodily malfunctions; they were writing about the soul’s distress that is manifest in the wild palpitations of the heart.

We are our bodies – and more. So when the body begins to break down, how does the soul cope? When the heart stops, what happens to the soul?  

(to be continued)

Record of the Nine Days

On October 7, the day after Boon's heart attack, I started a new journal. In its pages there is a record of what I learnt about Boon's condition over the nine days, most of it from the doctors, some of it my own observations. 

Day 1, Sat, Oct 6: 

[Collapsed at 3 plus in the afternoon and sent to SGH.
Was conscious at A&E.
Boon shouted "I can't breathe, I can't breathe" when oxygen mask momentarily removed in A&E. Doctors asked me to go out.]

[Consultant on duty Dr. S explained to Boon's mom and me that for this kind of attack] Usually immediate death upon arrest

Less than 10% chance of survival

Ecmo machine (life support) - 10 yrs ago did not exist

[Sent for CT scan at 5 something or 6. Result suggested that heart was too damaged by the attack; not possible to put in stent.]

Day 2, Sun, Oct 7:

Left main infarct (70 - 80% blockage of left ventricle) If blockage discovered before arrest, bypass would have resolved it. 

Not diabetic. No high cholesterol. No hypertension. 

Improvement

Nodded when Dr. S asked if he could hear. Organs ok.

Thrashed around in bed.
[Nurse said this was what the younger patients usually did. Because they want to get up, he said.]

Day 3, Mon, Oct 8:

Signs of pneumonia? Takes 24 - 48 hrs to manifest.

Echo scan of heart showed only 10 - 15% working.

Day 4, Tues, Oct 9:

Pneumonia. 

Kidneys started failing. Passed a lot of urine but toxins not expelled. Dialysis started. 

[Boon's mom and I] gowned up and went in. He teared [when we spoke to him].

Brain swelling due to ____? leading to damage

[Doctors and social worker talk to us about open heart surgery to implant a mechanical heart device the next day. Infection has to clear for operation to take place. And most of all, Boon has to regain consciousness and be able to respond to simple commands.]

Day 5, Wed, Oct 10:

Operation cancelled. 

Head moving from side to side. 

Face flinched when I said I was blinded by hate.

Day 6, Thurs, Oct 11:

Sedation turned off. Did not recover consciousness. Did not move all day. 

[Brought mobile phone to his bedside to] let his father speak to him. 

Day 7, Fri, Oct 12: 

Moved head from side to side when Father Stephen Yin prayed for him, holding his hand. [I did not see this. Was at the food court with C and D.] Moved shoulders and head towards me when I said C said he would do anything for me. 

Arrhythmia afternoon to night. Defibrillator used twice at least. 

Day 8, Sat, Oct 13:

Heartbeat rhythm 90s and BP [blood pressure] 80s. - Peaceful day. 

Dialysis machine changed. Catheter changed. 

Day 9, Sun, Oct 14:

Steady decline in heartbeat rhythm and BP from morning.

Official time of death 2004hr.

(to be continued)

How To Live

Until we learn how to die, we won’t know how to live. It was Boon, my lover and my friend, who told me this. They were the words of some famous writer, he could not remember who. I thought I knew what was meant by those words. I am pretty sure Boon thought he understood their meaning too.

When we first met, we found that we shared an obsession about death. I told him from very early on that I thought about death every day. He said he was the same. Talking about such things made us feel we were wise beyond our years. To know how to live, one must first learn how to die. It seemed pretty clear – the words resonated with us because we had gained enough experience and knowledge of the world, and above all, human nature.

 

The prospect of death seemed remote enough. We were thirty-something’s with the usual aches and pains of thirty-something’s working in deskbound office environments in a fast-paced city. We exercised at least twice each week and we tried to eat properly. We talked about death as if it were different from exercise and diet, as if it were something abstract. It was in the “Not Yet” category, something to get to after we sort out other more pressing and immediate concerns like our careers and saving enough for retirement.

 

Of course we were aware that deaths happened around us every day. But our consciousness about this belonged to the same order of consciousness when hearing a news report about Syria or some troubled zone somewhere far away. We could shut our minds and hearts to what the poor innocent people in such places have to suffer and endure on a daily, yearly, basis, because our lives carry on in a painless groove in spite of our knowledge of their ordeal. Such was the reality of death to us.

 

Boon died nine days after a sudden heart attack on October 6, 2012. We had been together for almost a year, but in those eleven months I never ever heard him complain about breathlessness or pains or discomfort in the chest. He did not mention any family history. He used to say that longevity runs in his family, pointing out that his grandfather was in his nineties and his grandmother lived till her eighties. On our last holiday together to Penang in August, we walked everywhere, often at a brisk pace, and not once did I see him stop to catch his breath.

On the morning of October 6, I was working at home, doing some research for my novel. Boon went to the gym. Before he went out, I asked him if he would like to watch a Woody Allen film later that evening. When he came back from the gym, he was very cheerful and I told him how well he looked. We drove to Whampoa for lunch and then we went to Far East Plaza because I had errands to run. Whilst we were in town, he collapsed. It was in the late afternoon, at three something. He was sent to SGH in a Civil Defense ambulance. I sat in the front, next to the driver. I was by the pallet when he was placed on it and wheeled into A&E. He had regained consciousness and his eyes and mouth were open. He was saying something to me but I could not hear anything because the oxygen mask covered his mouth. Boon was moved to the Cardiac-Thoracic ICU at ten something that night. He never got up from his bed. He died on October 14.

Watching Boon struggle and then slip into irremediable decline in those nine days at the Cardiac-Thoracic ICU filled me with awe and fear. Awe and fear not so much at death, but at life. What a mystery life is – a gift bestowed for seemingly no reason, and when withdrawn, no reason furnished either.

 

October 2012 was when I realized that for all the books I had read about death and aging, for all our conversations about death, Boon and I were clueless. To be stricken and to sense the impending loss of his life, to be unable to speak about his pain and his fear, how lonely he must have felt.   

 

In the A&E I remember saying to my friend Y who had rushed to the hospital after I called her: "Is he going to die just like that?" I felt utterly alone. In the A&E I prayed for the first time in a long while. When I prayed, I did not hear anything. 

 

(to be continued)

By Way Of Starting

Perhaps one way is to start with my eyes. In late October 2012 I was thinking about possible distractions. I was wondering what I could do that would occupy me and not require the kind of concentration or mental focus that I would have been incapable of possessing at that time. 

I recalled that it had been a while, possibly three years, since I went for a dental check-up. I also remembered a notice about an extensive eye test placed near the cashier of Paris Miki where I got my supply of daily disposable soft contact lenses, six months’ worth of lenses each time. I do not wear the contact lenses every day, and I only started going to this particular optical shop at 313 Somerset in 2011. I could not have seen the notice more than three times, but each time I found myself thinking that I should go for it, I should have my eyes rigorously checked. The dental appointment went smoothly. The eye test was a different story. 

The Paris Miki optician did not understand why I wanted to do a perimetry test, but I was adamant. Still, when the test started, she must have soon realised something was not quite right. She had to prompt me, “The test has started, Wei Wei,” after I did not show any reaction at all to the sparks that were probably already appearing on the screen. And she went on to re-start the test two more times, repeating the instructions slowly each time before she started the machine. After the tests had ended, I asked her, heart in mouth, if the results were okay. “All over the place, Wei Wei,” she said in a rather subdued tone of voice, “the results are all over the place.”

The perimetry test results suggested that the peripheral vision in my right eye seemed abnormally deficient. The deterioration of peripheral vision pointed to glaucoma. I was aware that my maternal grandmother suffered from glaucoma, but I had thought this was to do with her diabetes. The optician said that perhaps the results were due to the sensitivity of the machine in her shop, so she made an appointment for my eyes to be tested a week later on a different perimetry machine in a specialist eye clinic. Again, the results were no good. The advice I was then given was to have my eyes tested again in six months’ time. It was only then, when I told  my mother about the possibility of glaucoma, that she revealed that my aunt, her sister, was a sufferer. Much later on (just two days ago), I found out that my aunt had been using eye drops for twenty years.  

Back in November I did not worry about what all this could possibly mean. Still, between November 2012 and June 2013 when I went for the second round of eye tests, I did consider at the back of my mind the possibility of glaucoma, the fate of becoming blind. A day or two before I went for the tests, I thought about Borges and I wondered how much of his library he had read before he became blind. 

It is June 24, 2013, today. Last Tuesday I went to the Singapore National Eye Centre and had my eyes tested. The results showed that my right eye was afflicted with glaucoma, albeit early stage Open-Angle Glaucoma. I have since found out that this form of glaucoma accounts for at least 90% of all glaucoma cases. It develops slowly and is a lifelong condition without symptoms. 

As I waited for two and a half hours to see the consultant, I did not know yet the full picture, but I suspected the prognosis. I did not know very much about glaucoma then (strangely, I did not look up anything about the disease until the day before the tests at the SNEC) but I knew from the optician at Paris Miki that it led to loss of sight. 

I tried to think about leading my life without the ability to see. I asked myself if I would be able to adapt to this frightening development. I have always prided myself on my adaptability, but I could not fathom how I would cope without my eyes. 

I love to look at things. Looking at leaves and trees and flowers; looking at the perfect symmetry of a cat’s face; looking at my dogs; looking at the people I love; looking at paintings; and most of all, looking at words . . . where would I be, who would I become, if simple acts of looking are to become impossible? 

Waiting in the waiting room, I prayed and I asked God why he would let this happen to me, after all the other traumas of the past ten years. Why now when I had recently moved into my flat and was only just starting to feel again the possibility of happiness, whether it was at work, in my relationships with my family, in my friendships. Most of all, I had been ever so certain that God had granted me a new lease of life. Since the events of October 2012, my relationship with Him had been thoroughly transformed and I thought that surely, having freed me from my shame and self-hatred of the past five years, He would not put me through yet another trial. Surely not, o please, not me, not now.

Even though the damage to the optic nerve in the right eye is irreversible, glaucoma can be controlled through the daily application of prescribed eye drops. In three months’ time I will see the consultant at the SNEC again, I will do another round of tests, and hopefully the results will show that the condition in my right eye has not worsened. This will be the best piece of news one could hope and pray for, given the circumstances. And indeed I hope and pray that it will be my news in three months’ time. 

Meanwhile, between now and then, I shall write and relate the events that took place in October and November 2012. Because: 

When I think about why through the Holy Spirit God prompted me to have my eyes tested so that I could be saved from blindness, I believe that God has preserved my eyesight so that I can write and tell others about what I witnessed with my eyes. I witnessed His presence in October 2012 even though I had turned my back on Him and lived for quite some time as a spiritually blind person, and I did not think myself in any way in need of a cure for my blindness, so thoroughly convicted was I in my sense of self-mastery. There were times when I questioned the need for God to exist. Yet when my hour of need came, I called to Him and witnessed with my eyes His mercy, His grace, His love. 

“I was blind but now I see,” goes the hymn. It is curious how this most worn of analogies, the metaphorical significance of seeing versus blindness, something that I thought myself very clever to have understood when I was eighteen and writing essays about King Lear, that this most common of literary figures of speech, should take on a thoroughly literal resonance for me now.

To relate the journey back to God that I went on in October and November 2012 -- I have been wondering where and how on earth to start. Perhaps one way is to start with my eyes; start by telling what it was that I was led to see in October and what happened next. 

(to be continued)