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I was the first

I was the first to find his body.

Less “find”, I suppose, since he’d been in the rehab center for past month and half, so his location was known, but I was definitely the first to walk into his room and realize he was dead.

I’m not sure how I realized it so fast. I’d never been close to my grandfather, despite my family being the ones that had been taking care of him for the past eight years, despite me spoon-feeding him on countless occasions because he’d long been unable to feed himself. In situations like this in the stories, it’s the people that care the most that realize that a loved one has passed away, right?

We all hope to die with our loved ones nearby, not for the most callous of relatives to stride into our room with a dutiful soldier’s gait. But unfortunately for him and for me, I was the one to walk in after 9pm, father right behind me, and realize he was dead.

I hadn’t seen him for at least three weeks prior to his death, and the image that his corpse presented was horrifying. The skin was faintly yellow, and stretched over his head like papery tree park, viciously scabbed-over wounds faintly visible under his hospital gown. What struck me as wrong at first was his eyes, actually — they were open, unblinking and staring off to the side. There was no vapour in his breathing tube, either.

What sticks with me still is his expression. It was horrified, like he’d been stabbed three times in the stomach and the knife twisted. Like he’d died some horrible, painful death, not passed away of natural causes in a rehab center. It was an expression of despair that I did not expect.

I didn’t say anything at first, because I didn’t want to alarm my father for no reason. But then he got closer to the body, and I asked, “Is he still alive?” despite some steel certainty in my spine that he was dead. And then my father checked his pulse, his breathing, and his temperature — the body was still warm, so we’d only just missed him — and then I was told to call my mother while father called for a nurse.

She came in with a stethoscope and checked his heartbeat, and confirmed what I knew. My grandfather was dead.

Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t fond of him at all. For eight years I helped my mother take care of him as he got older, and there were no good enjoyable memories cultivated from those years. Just memories of my mother being run ragged from taking care of him and taking out her frustration on me, me having to spoon-feed him, his deadweight whenever he fell down and I struggled to get him off the ground with my paltry strength. Taking care of his was a struggle, and now it’s over.

Now his life is over too, and remembering the bland disinfectant-smelling rehab center he’d been installed in, I think it’s a good thing for him, not just me. My family doesn’t have to look after him anymore, and he doesn’t have to suffer being weak and bedridden, diapered like a baby and only being spoon-fed thick soup. A miserable sort of existence.

His passing was for the better, all-around. He was a very difficult man to love, and I certainly didn’t love him. My mother did, somehow, and I suspect that it was three parts Vietnamese familial obligation and five parts the fact that she had been his favourite child, and thus had many happy memories of him. Towards the end, she had been fighting with one of my aunts to bring him home from the rehab center — aunt wanted to leave him in there, and had the legal power to make medical decisions for him, but my mother pulled one of the oldest brothers of their family on her side, as well as the other aunt that had the power to make medical decisions. They split the family into two camps — leave him in the rehab center, or let him go into hospice care in my home.

He died before my mother and that aunt could start flinging the nastier accusations at each other, and the argument dissipated, but their ill temper with each other did not.

I couldn’t look at the body much. I turned away when my father started checking the pulse, and I walked out of the room completely when my other relatives showed up, frazzled and in disbelief. The corpse was ugly, and resembled a mummy more than the grandfather I remembered.

I remember a man in a solid green button-up shirt, with suspenders and beige slacks. Fancy shoes on his feet, black beret on his head, and vintage sunglasses perched on his nose, leaning on a cane as his sat on a chair at a Santa Monica cafe with my mother and my brothers and me as children around. I remember a man that my dear grandmother hated the fucking guts of and never talked to.

I remember a corpse with an expression wrought with agony, as if in the end, he became aware of all the circumstances surrounding his death, and he was horrified by them.

Goodnight, old man. I didn’t love you, I didn’t hate you, but I sure am fucking glad that you’re finally gone.

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