Clocks in hospitals tick the slowest.
Well. That seemed pretty true. For 48 hours since you came into the hospital, you fought a battle against kidney failure, pneumonia and water in the lungs.
I honestly hope none of you (ie. Whoever's reading this) has to ever see an IV bag in the hospital in the ICU at any point of time in your lives. It's painful, you know. Like to see your family member or whoever just plugged up to tubes and fighting an internal battle.
You. I shall use the royal "you" used to wake me up at 4am to get ready for school on a tuesday (school started at 9) and would call me while I was having dinner to check if I was still alive or if i'd "skipped school like you uncle, that rascal". Around the bed, everyone kept telling you to "hold on" and "等大姐回来", and you did. Well, a valiant attempt was made. Now that you're gone, well. I dont really know what to do anymore.
Sigh.
Dear reader (or future versions of me if no one reads this), I dont know about you, but watching someone slowly slip away is pretty surreal. First, their heartrate drops. And thats the first scare. You cry, you hug people, they tell you he's gonna be fine, and you get slightly okay. Then you wait. And you lose sleep, and you overthink. Next, kidneys. At this point of time, you know the end of their life is pretty much inevitable. Give and take 20 hours. Dialysis machines dont work any more, feet swell up. You try not to think about it. Family members start going into "dont let the kids hear you" even though we arent deaf, and statements or questions like "so do we start making plans?" are heard. You cry a bit more, wait a little, go down, take a walk. Not much you can do. You sit at the staircase calling your best friend and start wailing. You fool yourself into thinking miracles happen and it might just happen to you. Finally. After all the crying is done, and you think you might be okay? It happens. Yeap. Everyone bawls, the heartbeat's one straight line. And you cant do anything.
You tell your friends, cry. Tell more friends, tweet about it. They ask if you're okay, and you dont really know how to react. Because we all know that they have no idea how to make anything better or how to make you feel better at all because they cant.
And you remember 9th august as being possibly the saddest day of your life, even though its national day.
People talk about the babies born on national day, they kinda forget that people die on national day too. And yeah.
I'd like to think you got a pretty good life: 7 kids, two sons and 5 daughters, a beautiful eldest granddaughter (ie. Yours truly) and 4 other grand kids, with another on the way, a pint of beer whenever we got to head out as a family, dentures, a tortise, and your favourite sofa in the corner of the room. Geez, I have no idea how im gonna deal with not having fried egg and beansprouts just the way you did it. Hope you have a nice life up there, this world's too fucked up for you to stay any longer anyway.
There arent anymore tears I can cry right now, 阿公, I miss you so much. They always said you loved me the most. Maybe you were biased because im the eldest. I can only wish you journey mercy and hope that you protect us from above (as cliché as it sounds).
The curtain's been drawn (literally). I didnt think it would be this soon though.
Love you 阿公. Thanks for everything. <3
-audrey. (even though uou could never pronounce my name right)
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