By Christina Yin
I’m curled on the floor of my bedroom in my parents’ house in Petaling Jaya. There’s a strip of floor between the bed and my mother’s antique Chinese cupboard—just enough space to open the cupboard door. Just enough for me to curl up on the parquet floor.
The pillows are on the floor, along with the duvet. The bed is queen-size with a firm coconut husk mattress that my father found for me. I need a firm mattress for my back. My father had always found the things I’ve needed, but he’s no longer here to help me.
In the master bedroom, my mother sleeps alone.
When it’s morning, I make the bed so no one knows. During the day, I teach classes online while my mother focuses on the menu she plans for her sister, my second aunt, who has cancer. It had attacked her during Malaysia’s strict Movement Control Order, when we were isolated in our homes. Only after my father had passed away in July 2020, and the government had eased the restrictions, did my cousin take his mother to a doctor, but by then, it was too late.
My mother copes with my father’s passing by concentrating on cooking nourishing meals for her sister. I drive the food over. Even if she comes along, my mother will not always get out of the car to talk to her sister. It makes her too sad and she is afraid that she will not be able to stop herself from crying.
I bring the food up to the front door in a basket. Sometimes, my second aunt’s husband takes it from me at the door. Other times, I step inside and talk to my aunt. She lies in a hospital bed in the living room. I wear a mask and we talk about the food, about my cousin who video calls her every day from Singapore. My aunt is brave and never complains.
On the drive home, I tell my mother how her sister looked and what we talked about. There is nothing much to say, but it is what is happening today.
I remember how we said goodbye to my father. In the first few months of the pandemic, only a few people were allowed at funerals. All my father’s own siblings were overseas so the mourners included just a few of my mother’s relatives, former colleagues at the Geological Survey, and three good friends. My brother gave the eulogy, my second uncle and my fourth aunt said a few words. Then the casket was wheeled into the furnace at the crematorium, Nirvana.
The boat ride out to sea to scatter his ashes off Port Klang was calmer. There was just my mother, my brother and his wife, my husband, Melvin, and older daughter, Katie, and her boyfriend. We video called my younger daughter Emily who was isolating in Iowa. We had not
dared to try to fly her home. There were too many connections for her to make, too many opportunities for her to catch COVID-19 from other passengers, or to get stranded if flights were cancelled. There was no vaccine yet.
When we reached three nautical miles out at sea, the boatman switched off the engine and the funeral assistant beckoned me over to the boat’s prow. He handed me the urn that held my father’s ashes. Leaning forward, I tipped the urn over and the ashes spilled into the water. The others threw flowers from wreaths friends sent. My father had loved the sea. We had enjoyed many beach holidays when my brother and I were little and when my children were young as well.
After that, my husband had flown back to his work in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo while Katie had flown back to Scotland where she was in her fourth year of veterinary studies. I stayed on in my parents’ house for the rest of the year, teaching online, keeping my mother company, discussing nourishing meals, and delivering those meals to my mother’s sister who was dying, though no one ever said so.
My mother cries when she tells me her sister is praying for a miracle. Only when Emily is able to fly home to Kuching for Christmas, do I finally make plans to leave my mother and to go back to my family in Sarawak.
After being quarantined for seven days in a hotel, I’m back in my house with my husband and daughter, and I sleep on a bed next to my husband. It’s more than half a year before I return to my parents’ house to visit my mother again. In those intervening months, my mother’s sister succumbs, and then, within ten days of each other, my husband’s sister in Adelaide and his brother in Kuching pass away, and finally his uncle, a priest, dies from COVID-19 he contracted in Mukah. My parents-in-law suffer these successive tragedies stoically. My mother-in-law says, “God chose to take my children first. I don’t know why, but that’s what He wants.”
Strangely, the two times I’ve contracted COVID-19, I’ve been in my mother’s house and she has had to leave to stay with my brother and his wife, in their home across the state in Ampang. When I’m sick with COVID-19, I feel utterly lost and I despair. I find myself sleeping on the floor again, curled up on the narrow strip of parquet floor.
I learned how to do yoga during the pandemic, but I did not know then about the child’s pose. Now, I think I was trying to find comfort curled up like a child in a small space. It was all I could do after my father rasped out his last words, “Stay with me,” and I held his swollen hand through the night until I had to sleep for three hours, and then in the morning, when his agonal breathing was loud and laboured, until he was quiet and gone.
Those months after the funeral, cremation, and the scattering of ashes, I took on a version of the child’s pose. And then, when I contracted COVID-19, somehow, that was all I could do.