I barely felt it when I saw the words on the computer screen. But slowly it started trickling. It seeped into the crevices, coating my insides until I felt as if my intestines were made of lead, growing heavier and heavier with each passing minute.
Eight years ago, when my mother's father passed away from a heart attack, I'd woken up in the night with a gushing nosebleed. As I read my mother's e-mail, I tried to think of what I'd been doing when it was 5:50 PM in Taiwan.
4:50 AM in New Orleans. I'd been sound asleep. A dreamless night.
I didn't cry for my mother's father then. This time, I didn't cry for my father's mother either. When you are the child of immigrant parents whose families still live in their homeland, there's a distance you can't cross even when you're physically by their side. They've seen all your other cousins grow up before their eyes, but they can count the number of times you've flown to visit on one hand. You, with your muscled athletic frame and tanned skin, so unlike your Taiwanese cousins with their slender limbs and snow-white skin, can only communicate with them in simple sentences and blank stares.
I was never close to my father's mother. In personality, she was the complete opposite of the women in my mother's family. Given how my mother raised me, I couldn't relate to my father's mother much either. I'd heard my mother complain about her mother-in-law before, but it'd been especially frequent a few years ago when my grandmother required a liver transplant. Long story short, family drama had ensued. From that point on, my grandmother wasn't just a kindly faraway entity who always made toast with sunny-side-up eggs and ham in the morning or whose days revolved around preparing dinner. In the aftermath of the drama surrounding the liver transplant, I saw her as a human being unable to confront her own mortality, to nearly irrational ends.
Unlike the suddenness of my mother's father, I knew my father's mother was fading away. The first e-mail from my mother came over the weekend, reporting that she was in critical condition from a lung infection. The second e-mail came a day later, saying she'd been placed on a ventilator. I was in a strange place emotionally through all this. I went to my classes, I studied in my room, I lived life as normal, wondering when the next e-mail would come.
I recognize the heaviness as sadness. But I wonder about that trace of guilt nestled within it -- and why I feel as if I should have loved her in spite of her faults.
