My grandparents loom large. Yet I feel like I barely knew them.
My memories of them are few and faded. I’ve realized that part of my grief is about never getting more—more color, more detail, more stories. All I have are precious few still lifes.
An enormous, brown, bear-sized pair of worn house slippers, the padded footbed as flat as an inedible, leathery pancake. (My grandfather’s shoe size was 10.5 EEE.) My grandmother's porcelain mug of loose-leaf tea with its matching porcelain lid, perpetually steeping on a table in their bedroom. The back of her head, with its elegant chignon of gray hair. A bristly, scratchy feeling on my cheek, resting against one of the wool sweater vests or tweed blazers my grandfather wore. The satisfying click of the little ridged knob that powered on their TV when I snuck into their bedroom after school to watch “She-Ra: Princess of Power.”
Mostly, I remember them as they look in one specific photo. It looks like a perfect autumn day, with the kind of sunlight I imagine cats dream about. They look exactly, quintessentially like the grandparents I remember them to be—and it’s a bit circular, because when I remember my grandparents, I remember exactly this photo.
My grandmother’s hair is short, no longer in its thick twist. (A tactile memory now tingles in my palm: running my hand over the soft, fuzzy contours of her head.) It had just started to grow back after the radiation treatments that doctors in the United States had recommended to treat her lung cancer. The cancer had already spread to her trachea, they’d discovered, so an original plan to operate and remove the cancer from her lung was deemed no longer viable or recommended.
The regimen was two weeks of radiation, then one week off. My mother remembers my grandmother telling her not to worry because she had been through much worse. (Among the worse things, she had almost died during World War Two when she gave birth to stillborn twins.)
In 1985, my grandmother’s treatments were over. She was well enough for a glorious autumn walk in Williamsburg; then, for a trip to China to see the country and long-lost relatives that she and my grandfather had not seen since they’d fled to Taiwan 36 years prior, during the Chinese Civil War; then, for more travel between the U.S. and Taiwan.
Then, in 1987, she was not well again. During a stay in Taiwan, she fell in the bathroom. Sharing this story, my mom explained that bathrooms in Taiwan were inherently treacherous: they were traditionally designed with slightly raised doorstep ledges, i.e., built-in tripping hazards, to contain water. Bathroom floors were typically ceramic or marble. Tripping into or out of the bathroom was apparently a common accident. But after my grandmother tripped, something was off about her recovery. She had never been known to express anger. Now she was furious. She sent well-wishers away and demanded my mom’s presence. My mom left me and my sister in the care of my aunt next door in Virginia, and off she went.
That was the year I never went anywhere without Snow Bear, my polar bear stuffed animal.
A renowned surgeon (“one of the best in Taiwan,” my mom said) at a private hospital on Zhongxiao East Road in Taipei delivered the verdict: the lung cancer had metastasized to the brain, as lung cancers are prone to do, and now there was a large tumor there.
He delivered another kind of verdict which would torment my mom for the next four years. While my sister and I slept in our beds, she would lie awake in hers, in a living nightmare of self-recrimination and guilt. Why, this surgeon scolded, did my mom not have the mass in my grandmother’s lung removed before starting radiation the first time around? That’s definitely what he would have done. Then, he declared, the radiation would have treated the cancerous lesions that had spread to the trachea.
My mom shared this part of the story with my sister and me sometime last year. We had never known. She still wonders what she could have done differently and ponders what she did wrong.
In my head, the only place where I use the f-word: Well, fuck you, mister arrogant surgeon from Taiwan.
Mister arrogant surgeon operated on my grandmother’s brain on March 29th, 1987. My mother remembers the date because it was the annual Youth Day celebration, a holiday that commemorates 72 young rebels who were killed and buried in a mass grave in a 1911 uprising against the Qing Dynasty in China.
During the surgery, my mom took my grandfather out for lunch. I wonder if they could taste anything.
Surgery was deemed a success by the surgeon, who showed the excised tumor to my mom. It was the size of an egg. My grandmother spent three days in intensive care, followed by three more months of recovery at the hospital. My grandfather would visit during the day. My mom would arrive at 5pm and then sleep in the chair next to the hospital bed. After that, my grandmother was prescribed six weeks of radiation treatment, a cumbersome taxi ride away, for her brain. But it was too much to endure. After five weeks of watching my grandmother suffer, my mom cut off the treatment and took her home—back to Virginia.
She was back in time to watch my sister perform in the Nutcracker that winter. And that spring, she attended my sister’s middle school graduation, courtesy of a profusion of pillows. Without them, the wooden folding chairs in the school gymnasium would have been unbearably uncomfortable.
Now she could no longer walk. Now she could hardly talk. Now the cancer was in her spinal fluid. Now there was nothing more to be done. Now there was everything left to do. For months, my mom carried my grandmother down the stairs in the mornings and back up the stairs in the evenings. Late at night, she sewed floral robes, with velcro openings, so my grandmother would still have pretty things to wear. In the meantime, my grandfather was diagnosed with stomach cancer. When my grandmother heard this news, my mom said, she promptly contracted shingles.
This is about where my memories resume. I remember the intriguing blue plastic device with a breathing hose and floating ball that sat unused, gathering dust. I remember the hacking, choking sound of the cough that had no hope of clearing what was deep in her lungs. I remember trying to help by doing what my mom did—press soft, clean tissues gently to my grandmother’s mouth to wipe away the spittle and catch the phlegm. I remember endless wastebaskets of tissues. I remember the there-but-not-there look on her face, and not knowing what I should do in her presence. I remember tucking my two yellow stuffed animal ducks under her arms, on the off chance it might cheer her up. I remember setting up my music stand in her room and playing my violin for her.
I remember, I can barely bring myself to remember, seeing her move her arms. She was trying to clap.
By the end of October, there were no grandparents in my house.
I draw a blank.
Beautiful, Kathy. Thank you for sharing your (and your family's) story with us. I'm looking forward to reading more!