Move On or Move With

Life after a death in the family is mind-bendingly difficult and confusing. Routine feels flippant. Gathering in large groups feels jarring. The grief takes away from the joy just as much as the reverse is true. I am not stuck between joy and grief, but am wildly fluctuating between the two. Holding both extremes within is strange and uncomfortable, to say the least.

I wonder how I can “move on”, yet struggle with this advice to move further away from the time my mum was still alive.

I don’t want to move on from. I want to stay. Or, at best, move with this grief.

Perhaps this straining to contain both joy and grief within such close proximity of each other is my new normal. And that I need to learn to move with it in me. Maybe.

I am grasping at the last physical vestiges of her presence. A repurposed plastic bottle nestled among my other grains, with an ageing sticker label – “BUCKWHEAT” in her assertive handwriting. A couple of random pages of a recipe, with no title, leaving me to guess what the final product is meant to be. Her waffle knit sweater from Uniqlo – one of many Uniqlo items she had in her wardrobe. It fit her casual, highly functional style. The vacuum-packed curation of lotus seeds, red dates and dried longans that she hoped for me to turn into a sweet soup. It still sits in the back of the fridge, wondering its destiny.

This golden loaf of cranberry bread that had been waiting in the freezer, bears my mum’s signature thick dusting of flour and slightly under-proofed form. A product of her Skills Future lessons that she so fervently signed up for every weekend leading up to her sudden illness.

It was delicious, but painfully so.

Over this past weekend, my family and I went to the Garden of Peace to be with my mum for a bit. We brought orchids for her, poured water from her favourite water bottle, said little personal prayers for her, and just hung out with her.

My tears flowed like 5 October was just yesterday. The raw pain came back and my daughter was dutifully digging tissues out of my handbag for me, and collecting my used ones to throw away.

Between tears, I told her I missed her grandma, whom she called wai po (外婆) so much – I wished wai po were still around to bring her for movies, and go for rides on double decker buses and LRT trains.

My wise little sage said “We can still do them together.”

And in that one sentence, she taught me how to move with, instead of move on.

By Daphne Yuan