Intense..

Firstly some halloween scare before I start...
Scary stuff!!

well, it's been an intense past month... So much learning, so much experiencing of things. Coming back from a wonderful visit to Katie in North Carolina, I've been settling back down in Vancouver, at least trying to... There's been a state of civil unrest inside my mind. After living a year out of the watchful eye of my parents, i always feel like a bird in a cage coming back home, at least for the first few weeks.My first feeling when I was coming back home was that I felt inspired to go out in the world and live, and to take the world by its proverbial horns and hang on... Also was the fact that I was so lucky to have such a comfortable home. Everything is clean, fully working, and mostly new.

First I had to try to fit back into this life here though, just as I was trying to fit the past four years of my life into my room. I spent two weeks on-and-off unpacking, and trying to cram everything into something that I don't quite fits anymore. I ended up going through my whole room, and throwing out a large amount of paper that I know I would never miss.. Years of school notes, old clothes and magazines that had been lying forogtten.
It jsut seemed like there was this huge load hanging over me. a childhood's worth of memories and memorabillia, and the clutter was just really overwhelming.

My grandpa also passed away two weeks ago. It's so strange to realize that you won't be able to speak with someone, ever again. It was just hard to see him, such a proud and jolly man suffering like he did, with cancer. Like so many people have said, they seem fine until they start to fade, and then they fade fast. Really fast. I went to visit him at home at the beginnig of november, and it really hit me how hard it must be for him. He was starting to have trouble walking around and even getting up, and basically bed-ridden, . This is the man who a year ago, when he was first diagnosed with cancer, had a pedometer that he would carry around, and one day I looked at it, and it said something like 8000 steps and he said that was like nothing. That's an impressive kilometre and a half every day, for a 77 year old!!

Then two weeks, later, he went into the hospital. His room almost always had our family in there, to feed him, and just to keep him company. I don't think think he's woken up alone in the longest time, and when someone was there to see him in the morning, he told us that's what made his day brighter. He was in the hospital, trying cream of mushroom and minestrone soup, and yoghurt for the first time in his life. "It's pretty good, I've never tried it before" was what he had to say about that. And then over the next day or two, he lost consciousness. As sad as it was for everyone in the family, in a weird way, my grief was tinged with a bit of relief when my dad popped his head into my room that morning to say that he had passed on. Relieved because he was no longer in pain. My sister had a dream that night/morning that she was visiting Grandpa, and he had woken up, and his eyes were bright. My sister went to his bed and told him that everyone had been really worried about him, and he just looked at her and held her hand. Then my sister leaned in to give him a hug at the bed, and then he stood up, smiled at her, and gave her a hug. That was when my dad woke my sister up to tell her the news. My grandma had a similar dream, where he was quiet and bright-eyed, and my sister wonders if he had come to her in dreams to say goodbye. It seems like it.

So the past two week has been a lot of family time. Everyone's been coming together. all 5 of my mom's siblings, and their families. All twenty-two of us, even my uncle who flew in from Thailand. My grandpa's funeral was last week, and it affected me deeply, and opened my eyes a lot, about nature of death, my own beliefs, and who I am and where I come from.

I've never been to a funeral of anyone I've known well until now, much less a traditional chinese funeral. Unlike what I've heard of north american funerals, where you celebrate the life of your loved ones, it seems that what I went to was much more of a preparation, for the journey to the afterlife, and for, well, life in the afterlife. I've remembered trying to believe in reincarnation, and the afterlife, and I've had trouble trying to "convince" myself to believing. I guess it's just that I had no concept of death to grasp in the first place, and it really does seem like it's humanity's way of dealing with such matters, of bringing closure, or understanding the incomprehensible. Now I understand why burial ceremonies are seen as so important in human history, as a marker of our mental evolution. It just seemed appropriate that he needed preparation to leave, that his spirit was still near his body, not quite understanding what had transpired, not believing. Grandpa was decked out in his finest suit, hair slicked back like it usually was, and his face slightly unnatural from the way that his normally drooping ends of his lips were not pulled back tautly. The priest went up to him, and whispered who my grandpa was to his spirit, so that he would know who he was, in his afterlife, and know who his family in the living world was. There's a chinese custom to burn paper offerings to the deceased, with the belief that these paper replicas would manifest themselves in the afterworld. It's common to burn "ghost money" for the dead, and I think we burned him enough to last a long time. Something on the order of a few billion dollars, I guess, with a bag of "bribe money" to give to the guards of the afterworld to make the journey easier. Along with a red mercedes, a big house, clothes, a debit card, a stereo, toiletries, and two personal servants. I think he should be set for (after)life.

Something else I found fascinating about the ceremony was all of the evocative symbolism everywhere. The concepts of spirit, the fire, the burning, and the priest who performed the rites, and sang a song, where he read out all the members of my Grandpa's family in a sing-song voice. Everyone was dressed in white clothes, and a black ribbon tied around all of the family. Women wore these white shrouds, while the men wore these straw belts, and children of my mom's generation wore a white belt, and if unmarried (which we all were), with a red dot. There was a lot of bowing, to pay our respects for him, and we would line up, sons and the mother in the first row, the daughters in the next row, followed by male spouses, female spouses, male grandchildren, and female grandchildren, all according to senority from left to right. In a way, it was really revealing of traditional chinese culture and its hierarchy that is still prevalent, even today. Bowing would be done thrice, and with burning incense when first appearing before my grandpa.

The family sat on the left side of the room, and when friends of the family showed up to pay their respects (we spent the whole day there, basically waiting for people to show up), they were bow to the deceased with incense, and then we would bow to each other at the same time, before they went to take their seat.

One of the hardest parts of the whole thing was my grandma, who was so heartbroken that day. I've never ever seen anybody as sad as she was that day, and it was just so hard, knowing that there was nothing you could do for her to lessen the grief. I think that in the end, the fact that the whole family has been together has definitely made things easier. Being in a large group of 22 people, young and old makes it a bit easier to deal with the sadness, but it also just seems like there's something that's missing, doesn't it, when I look at my grandma staring off into space.
A bunch of us went to the cemetery to pay a visit to grandpa today. and we burnt some more incense and offerings, and even some offerings of brandy, by pouring it in front of the grave while bowing. But you can sense the sadness in my grandma when she's sitting there, just thinking... She's much quieter now. I put on her hat today while shopping at Yaohan, and it's nice to know that she can still laugh, despite everything.

| feeling: sad |
Today's Photo: Old photo of my grandparents