It still hurts...
It was not until page 71 when tears started streaming from my eyes. It was Christmas Eve, and I’m lying on my bed, totally absorbed in the pages of Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom.
The words that turned on my taps?
“I lost my mother when I was a child…and it was quite a blow to me…I wish I’d had a group like yours where I would have been able to talk about my sorrows. I would have joined your group because…because I was so lonely…”
Except, that it wasn’t my mother I lost. It was my father.
My father left us on 3rd November 2008, slightly over a year ago. He died of cardiac arrest in our house.
I deliberately used the word ‘left’, because it did seem (or rather, it was) that way. There weren’t any warning signs, not even a hint.
It was just like any other day.
My father returned from work on that fateful Sunday night, and as was his routine, he would take a nap before he showers.
My father’s work was tough, very tough. He would wake up before the sun is up each day, and make his way to this fruit shop in Joo Seng housing estate. Most days, I’m guessing, he sleepwalks there.
He had rented the fruit shop. He’s always wanted to start his own business, though past ventures had either failed, or he was cheated of his “investments”.
So he would toil all day at the fruit shop, and come home totally exhausted at around eleven every night.
And when he stepped into the house, he would always pick his usual spot in front of the TV, and collapsed like a sack of potatoes. Before long, his loud snores could be heard – which to me, sounded more like the grunts of an overworked buffalo.
Most times, he would lose track of time, and slept till past two in the morning. His snores spoke volumes of the day’s labor. And as the years went by, those snores sounded more like an asthmatic person gasping for breath.
Sometimes, I would wake him up and remind him that he should shower and sleep. Most times, I would just let him sleep till the next morning.
And so it was, on that fateful night, he hadn’t had his routine nap when I returned from church and later on, accompanied a friend on a shopping trip.
He greeted me with his usual words: “Have you eaten?”
I only nodded my head.
He said he had bought some sweet desserts for mum and me, and that we should tuck in while they were still warm. I declined.
I was too exhausted from the day’s activities, and though I was used to being a nocturnal creature, I plonked onto my bed before midnight, and was soon fast asleep.
I remembered, though, that in the moments before sleep captured me, I heard my mum calling out from the bedroom for my father – to rouse him from his nap and remind him that he should shower.
In my semi-conscious state, I heard my father mutter a reply of sorts. This was followed by a series of coughs, as my father urged himself to make his way to the bathroom.
He always lit a cigarette before he showers. I heard the flick of a lighter, splashes of water as the tap is turned on, and lapsed into a deep slumber.
* * *
What happened in the next few minutes changed my life forever.
It hit me like a nightmare, though I had no recollection of having had one. It’s one of those inexplicable encounters.
I was jolted from my deep sleep – to say that I have been zapped by an invisible bolt of lightning would have been an exaggeration but you get the idea.
I bolted from my bed, and headed for the bathroom, stung by a strange premonition that something was amiss.
It turned out something was wrong, awfully wrong.
I heard loud wheezing sounds from the bathroom, the kind you hear when a person suffers a serious asthmatic attack. Except that, my father never had asthma.
I banged on the door, and called out his name.
“Pa…Pa…what’s wrong? What happened?” Wheezing sounds.
After a few attempts, I gave up banging, and tried to scale the bathroom door, using my toes to hook on to the grooves in the door, and using my arms to lift myself up.
I saw my father slumped at a corner of the bathroom, naked, white foam oozing out from his mouth, and trickling down his right cheek. There was a string of faeces on the floor next to him.
His whole body looked pale.
I ran into my parents’ bedroom and woke my mum up. Something’s not right, I said, Pa fainted in the bathroom.
Still a little dazed, and eyes squinting, mum followed me into the kitchen. She wasn’t expecting the end of the world. She said my father had complained of back aches a couple of days ago. She didn’t suspect anything.
Grabbing the kitchen knife, I forced it through the slit in the doorway and gave the latch a forceful upward yank.
I pushed the door open, and only managed to hit the left foot of my father’s slumped body.
Shivering, panicking, and heart racing, I tried to shift the motionless body to its side, while avoiding stepping the strand of faeces on the floor.
“We need to get him out of the toilet,” I said to mum. “Help me.”
posted by weiwen @ 6:00 PM
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