reflection. thoughts on a s bahn ride

a german guy, an asian woman, and who appeared to be their daughter got on the hamburg s bahn. the parents seated themselves next to a black woman, leaving one extra seat free. the daughter, however, kept on walking, seemingly reluctant to sit with them.

"come sit here with us," said the asian mother.

the girl cast a hesitant look at the black woman and then shook her head.

the asian mother noticed that i was gazing at them (i did not plan to be discreet either), and maybe hence became a bit self conscious. She urged her daughter to sit down with them even more pressingly.

i looked at the girl's brunette hair and round brown eyes, and then at the mother's slightly slanted eyes, and finally at the black woman, who remained silent the whole time. blocked by the profile of the father, i could not decipher the look on her face.

i also caught a glimpse of my reflection on the windows, black long straight hair, tanned skin, dark brown eyes.

i wonder what that girl was thinking when she saw me, or her very own reflection.

i think i will never find out.

Das Unumgängliche

Anne Carson has the exact term for this, das unumgängliche, that cannot be tackled, that cannot be got round.

I have been haunted by the idea that maybe my grandfather has already passed away, and my family is just keeping me in the dark.

I wrote my mother about a week ago, asking how things are back at home-- are her nerves still bad, is father waiting for the release of diablo iii, when will my future niece be born, does grandmother miss me and finally, how's grandfather doing.

She answered everything in detail, even mentioned our poodle, who is getting chubbier and chubbier day by day. But nothing about my grandfather. The absence is so conspicuous that makes him more present than ever. Insufferably present.

If, god forbids?

I do see this coming, my grandfather has been diagnosed with cancer for more than a year now, and before the chemotherapy, the doctor was saying he has only three months.

I have been back at home twice after the bad news. Every time I saw him, with his haunch back and hollow cheeks, struggling to walk or fumble through things (Yeats has a befitting imagery: a tattered coat upon a stick) I shudder at the thought that it might be the very last time I see him while he's still alive. (and he is/was merely.) I still don't know how to tackle death: my other grandfather died more than three years ago, I do not believe that I have fully recovered from the grief. I moved to Europe soon afterwards and have been overwhelmed by cultural shocks and the need to figure out my life. Everything and everyone back home feels distant and foreign, as if from another life. Change of time and space, hence the quasi change of the universe, I somehow managed to avoid tackling one of the biggest issues in life-- death of a close family member.

And the issue creeps back to life as the bad news traveled across the Eurasia continent, followed by the sleepless nights, the engulfing silence of darkness, and the sudden inexpressible fear.

But Berlin has been a good distraction, so are friends and the Internet. Sometimes I do not even think about my grandfather, until his absence was made conspicuous in my mother's email.

I started checking the Facebook pages of my family (fortunate or not, the whole family is on Facebook), looking for clues. And then I finally saw my dad's status update in early April, mentioning that he was in the hospital to bring grandfather home.

Leaving the hospital is not necessarily a good thing, especially when the patient is terminally ill. In where I come from, a person only has a ”proper” death when he lies on his bed at home, surrounded by family. Anything else is considered miserable. And the most miserable death of all, dying in a foreign country where neither family nor long time friends are around.

If death is imminent, rituals take over.The honoring is, however, more for those who survived than the deceased. We need closure. We need to say goodbye. We cannot keep on hanging there in the emotional limbo.

One of my greatest fears, I always say to my friends, is that if anything shall happen to my family, I will need more than thirty hours to travel home only to be present. Thirty hours might not sound like a long travail, but the emotional agony, the anticipation of being too late for a proper closure-- such turmoil can only be understood by the prodigal sons and daughters, the lonesome fellow members of the diaspora.

So here I am, sitting on a ride to Hamburg, the travel grants too much time for the mind to wander. And I am now haunted by the fear that I might have already missed out the closure. It cannot be got round.