When She Goes

When she goes
In her blue dress
And pearls

What will I do?

When they send her
Into the fire
The last I will see

Of her

How will I move?

She’s all I can see
In the ocean of my mind
Her greyed hair
Her drooping eyes
Her tiredness

Yet stronger still
Is her presence in me
The woman I knew
30 years ago

The fire
The love
The oxygen
She’d burn

So hot in her spirit

You longed for the cool

All the years of fight
And flight

The yearnings
And confessions
The in-betweens

Bids for attention
Attachment
Acknowledgement

You couldn’t understand

But why should you?

I have inhabited two bodies

Yours, mine

And the space in between

When the fire consumes you

What will be left?

A reading of “When She Goes”

I wrote the above poem on the 23rd of October 2022.

It was one of the times when after visiting my mother I felt that things weren’t looking good and I had to really think long and hard about what it would look like when she passed on.

My mother passed away on the 24th of July 2023 at 8.25pm. My father passed away on the 24th of July in 2015 (eight years ago to the date) at 1.43am.

My brother took this as a sign that she is now happily reunited with Papa in heaven.

Some would disagree saying in heaven there is no marriage.

I think that ultimately what matters most is that she is free and no longer suffering.

My mom’s mind and body went into a slow decline over the last five years. In fact, while she was alive, her suffering was etched in my mind’s eye all the time and I couldn’t stop feeling worried about her, but now that she’s gone and finally free and safe, I feel a lightness in my spirit.

Yes, I know the grief will come in waves.

Yesterday the grief really set in and I couldn’t move for a bit. I lay on the couch feeling completely overwhelmed and lost, ate some dark chocolate, drank brandy, came completely undone over the phone with an old friend from Los Angeles and then carried on with my life.

Coming back to Singapore was intentional: I had come back in October 2018, quit my corporate job at NFL LA studio headquarters to come back to Singapore for my mom’s operation. This was the fourth time she had been diagnosed with cancer.

I flew back over the weekend to make it in time for my mother’s operation the following Tuesday to get rid of the cancerous growth they had found in her large colon.

I had rushed back for the operation because she was high-risk (10%) for dying mid-way through operation because of her heart problems and the attendant complications: they had to take her off blood thinner for the operation.

The operation went well, and her recovery took close to six months. It seemed that we would all be able to return to a semblance of calm and normalcy again – and that is when I started looking for a full time job.

But in July 2019 when she went for a follow up CT scan, we discovered that her cancer had come back for the fifth time – “Colon stage IV cancer” uttered by her oncologist at Ng Teng Fong Hospital, felt like a death knell to my ears.

My life here in Singapore was mainly about looking after my mom and spending quality time with her in her twilight years. So I took on a part-time job as a Creative Project Manager at a motion graphics studio, so I would have enough bandwidth to help out with many of the issues she was facing.

I also wanted to heal my relationship with her which had its fair share of brokenness.

In the midst of prioritising time together, we did things she liked, like eating durian and going to new places with good food.

Sometimes we just hung out.

But during my time here, COVID happened, my marriage of eight years also fell apart in 2021 due to a particularly bad assault, and I came to realize that what I had assumed to be a difficult marriage with my ex was actually a toxic and abusive one which I was thankfully (unlike many other women) able to escape from due to finally understanding what gaslighting and coercive control was.

So it was a time of intense emotional upheaval for me and my reality was broken at the same time.

My mother’s colon surgeon had given her in July 2019 “weeks to months” to live with the caveat that some of his patients with their will to live and their faith had long outlived their prognosis. 

My mom was one of such patients.

In spite of my best efforts to show up and be there for her, I often felt at my wits’ end with my mother because of many of the differences in how we expressed love and our different attachment styles.

I needed space, but she would ask questions that made me feel like a child that had to prove things to her so she wouldn’t worry.

“You don’t have to work?” she would say to me when I came to visit her. I would explain to her about my Trauma Consulting Company that I was running.

Yes, I was busy, but I wanted to take time out of my day to see her. I wanted her to be happy when she saw me, not worried.

In many ways, she could pick up on things that I tried to keep hidden from her, so that she wouldn’t worry. However, these things would affect her somehow and she’d act out and complain about things just to cope with the emotional discomfort, so I’d often leave feeling misunderstood and dysregulated.

So in the midst of my healing and piecing myself together, I sometimes had to disengage and be emotionally unavailable to her.

Thankfully she had many other people whom she’d reach out to and who responded to her with love and kindness much of the time.

For that I’m grateful.

For all of her foibles, my mom really loved people and often went out of her way to express her love and appreciation of them especially through her cooking and later on, when she was no longer able to cook, through buying food for them.

I was among the recipients of her love and unstinting generosity towards me – one of my most favorite dishes by my mom is her popiah.

I still have her unique popiah recipe, perhaps one day I will have a popiah party to celebrate her life with friends.

—————————————————————-

Towards the end, when she was bed-bound and forgetful of the date and times and even where she was, I shared some of my most intimate moments with her, especially when I lay side by side with her in her bed at Assisi Hospice and shared with her about things in my life that gave me joy.

I would show her pictures of people or events in my life, or listen to an audiobook with her, or simply tell her stories about little things in my life. And she would listen and smile.

She was happy for me.

Suddenly this whole world that I had kept hidden because of a fear of judgment could be revealed to her as she started really listening.

The gulf between my mother and me became less pervasive.

We also were able to do some fun activities together like art therapy. We made polymer crabs and painted together.

It was really nice to do things like that together because sometimes, just being or doing things together was enough.

We didn’t really need to talk too much.

And sometimes doing these things together actually helped to trigger conversations about memories of better times that connected us through the years.

Even though the grief comes in hard and heavy at times, like tidal waves, I realise that what I had come back here for was deeply fulfilled.

The mother wound that I had carried inside for years – the feelings of not being seen, heard or felt by her, has finally healed.

And it wasn’t because she changed insomuch as I took the steps I needed to heal from an abusive marriage, broken relational patterns and draw better boundaries for myself with others, I was able to really love and embrace my own personhood and be kind to myself.

It was only then that I was able to see my mother for who she really was, someone who really loved me, but who had never been able to heal from her own trauma, and by seeing her as she really was, I was able to accept her fully.

To end this post, I thought it fitting to share another poem I had written about love and attachment:

The Contours of Love

When you think about people
You think about love
You think about the contours of love

I drew a picture of you
Today

It felt like your dark skin close to mine
Your embrace; your touch

I lay in my mom’s embrace today
So close to her
As she complained about
How it hurt in her right hand

And I got up to massage her palm
If only briefly
Before descending back into
Her arms

I told her how I now will need to
Buy my own insurance
(As if I didn’t before)
Because she had purchased
Travel insurance for me

I painted a picture today
Of my mother
The mother who protected me
Planned ahead

The mother who was savvy
Self-aware, contained

When you think about words
You realize how few are needed

At times

And how much is missing

For all that falls between the lines