Yee Ku Poh

My grand-aunt passed away on Tuesday morning. She was my paternal grandfather's younger sister, mother of two, widow from quite young but happy in her own way. I haven't seen her for many, many months, and I suppose I shan't ever see her again. I remember from my childhood a small, often sweet-faced woman, who with time, became delicate and fragile that you'd be afraid of crushing her slender bones with a hug, but sparkling with a quick mind and even quicker tongue when you did something she didn't approve of.

Her wake was held yesterday, in her house just behind my grandfather's. I can just imagine it, even though I was not there to say the final goodbye. The coffin was one of those with a glass panel at one end - I can picture the calm scene, perhaps just a simple, very ordinary wake of an old woman you could see lying there - could she still be sleeping?- over the bed of dry ice preserving her like magic against the sultry Malaysian heat she'd known all her life. Face and body clean after a long but unnoticed fight against liver cancer, her soft parchment skin and snowy hair blending into the cream or white or just plain beige of the pillow under her head. Bright dark eyes that sharpened in discontent as often as they flashed with laughter now forever unseeing under the closed, papery lids.

My memories hold scenes of a woman struggling to fill the blue echoes and shadows of a house too big and long empty of children and family. The faded red of kua chee seeds concealing a sliver of white crunchy flesh, the tantalising red of hong pau promising an addition to the piggy bank. I can hardly ever say I knew her, and her passing costs me no emotion; well, perhaps a little relief that she suffers no more, as they always say, and there is closure to her final months of just existing. For myself, I'll take a while to remember her from my days of innocence, back from where the spicy tang of family politics had yet to be discovered, when a kiss and hug for a slightly-smiling, delicate-featured woman were easy gifts in exchange for a cold juicy kam and the treasured envelope of red.