Last week, my grandfather taught me about something the Chinese call the “Five Blessings” in life, or Wu Fu Lin Men.
The Chinese believe that if you wanted to look back at your life and heave a big sigh of satisfaction when death comes knocking at your door, all you need are five things – health, wealth, longevity, integrity and hospice – or something like that.
You see, my grandfather wasn’t explaining all this to me over our reunion dinner, or over one of our dim sum sessions that has grown increasingly rare as I grew up. He was telling me between gasps of air, with barely enough strength to speak above a whisper.
After being healthier than me all my life – jogging every day, eating healthy and staying more positive and cheerful than I’ve ever been – he was diagnosed with terminal leukemia just over a month ago, and given between a few weeks to four months to live.
I remember the first time I visited him at the Selayang Hospital, Kuala Lumpur, after his diagnosis. Just as it was with all those postponed dim sum sessions, I’d been too busy with work and life in general, only finding time to see him three days after he was admitted.
When I finally got to the hospital, he was looking weaker than I had ever seen him, and one of my aunts told me he had been asking about me.
The love of a grandparent involves a lot of waiting, often alone.
I awkwardly asked him a few questions in my broken Hakka (my family’s dialect) about how he felt and what the doctors said. Of course, he said he felt fine, though he looked far from it.
Later when we were alone in the room, he sat me down and told me he knew his time was almost up. He would be refusing chemotherapy because he had lived a good, long life and wanted to die in peace.
Being typically unselfish, he added that I didn’t need to visit him if I was busy, and that I should go out and enjoy myself a bit more.
That night, I went home and cried. People often talk about the love of a father or mother, but it was then that I truly realised the love of a grandparent.
It’s a love that accepts that they won’t see or hear much from those they’ve dedicated a lifetime loving and providing for, even in the final precious years of their lives, but continues to hope and wish for the best for them even if it’s only from afar.
My niece Mikayla with her grandparents and great-grandparents. Both grandparents and great-grandparents don't get to see Mikayla often, but their faces light up every time they do.
Sometimes, it feels like my grandfather and I are worlds apart. I know he doesn’t understand a lot of the things I do, like paying RM400 for a pair of jeans. Or why I don’t cut my hair more often, and when I do, why I’d pay RM50 for it when the barber across the street can do it for RM5.
But he never complains, even though he’s never known such luxuries or excesses in his life, which was all about providing for his 10 children in the abject poverty of probably Kuala Lumpur’s most notorious new village, Jinjang.
He’s lived through the death of both his parents as a teenager during the Malayan Emergency; a period in his life that left such a mark on him that until now he never wastes any food on the table, remembering the times when even a sweet potato was hard to come by. War, he tells me, is a terrible thing to live through.
Yet, having been through all he has, he told us on Sunday that we, as a family, have experienced the “Five Blessings”.
He said we’ve had health, he’s had longevity, we’re all honest, hard-working people and he’s getting proper hospice to see out his final days; though he added cheekily: “You guys don’t really have wealth, but that’s okay.”
Earlier on, the doctors discharged him because his final wish was to spend one last Chinese New Year with us. During that period, my brothers and I took him out for dinner at a shabby Chinese restaurant because the fancy one we wanted to bring him to was booked up for a wedding.
One of my grandfather's final wishes after he was diagnosed with terminal leukemia was to spend one last Chinese New Year with the family. This was it.
He was so happy just to have that meal with us, he quoted a Chinese proverb which says that as beautiful as the sunset is, it only lasts for a fleeting moment.
True enough, he was re-admitted last Thursday, delirious, gasping for air and shaking uncontrollably. The doctors told us he might not make it, so he gave his last words to his children as soon as he was lucid again.
He phoned those overseas, including my father, even though he could only mumble a few words while they comforted him and promised to come back as soon as possible.
He somehow pulled through, and is fighting the infection that forced him back to the hospital. I’ve been going there every day since, just hoping to spend some time with him whenever he feels well enough to communicate. Again, he’s always telling me not to stay at the hospital too long and to go out and enjoy life.
But the pain of knowing that you are about to lose someone you love can make you wonder if life is worth living in the first place. The only consolation I have is that I have given him some joy in the sunset of his life, and thanks to him I now know that I am truly blessed.
* All the pictures in this post are by my brother, Elroi Yee.
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