“Have you eaten?”
My grandma is dying. In truth, she’s been dying for years now, my months punctuated with hospital scares and doctors’ warnings: “Get ready to say your goodbyes.” Yet, she’s still here, 97 years old, defying death with all the rage Dylan Thomas wrote of.
But now, I think, she’s really dying this time. Instead of emergency hospital visits, we’re now talking about hospice. And though I’ve been emotionally prepared all those times before, is anyone truly ever ready?
These days when I see her at my parents’ house, she greets my living children with crackers and candy she keeps by her bed. She asks me whether I’m staying to eat. She tells her nurse to cook me something. It’s the Asian love language.
Some of my first memories of her—my 外婆 (maternal grandmother)—involve food. There she is in the kitchen, kneading dough with her hands and a wooden roller. She’s making 蔥油餅 (green onion pancakes) from scratch; to this day, my godsiblings say my grandma’s were the best, betraying their own grandmothers’ pancakes in the process. They were the perfect combination of salty and thin, with just the right amount of crisp. 外婆 would stack them, ready-to-cook, in the freezer, leaving a flour-powdered table and chairs in her wake.
We had platefuls of them for breakfast.
Ask me what it’s like to watch someone you love die in stages, and I’ll tell you I don’t know.
I’ve now walked through my mother-in-law’s death by cancer, and my adopted son’s rapid decline from lung disease.
What I can tell you is that no matter how expected it may be, death always takes you by surprise. And you are never ready to say goodbye. Because my 外婆 is 97; we’ve been living on borrowed time for years; and I still think of that phone call with dread.
“When people pity you, it’s like they honestly don’t realize the exact same thing’s coming for them. And then I feel embarrassed and uncomfortable and have to pity them, because, like, do you not realize it’s always someone’s turn?” —Emily Henry, A Million Junes
Once she’s gone, I’ll have no more living grandparents. But I’m not the only one to have lost a beloved grandparent, just like I’m not the only person to have lost a child.
Is that comforting or devastating?
Grief is a companion that will come to us all. Whenever I meet someone who also knows its name, I say, “I’m sorry you understand,” and, “I’m grateful you understand,”—both.
When I visit her at my parents’ house, I ask her for stories. She has lived in my old room since she moved in years ago, when her failing limbs left her bereft of the independence she once treasured so dearly. I sit next to her, her weathered hand in mine, as she tells me about her past.
Earlier this February, she told me about the night my mother contracted polio at three years old. “Oh, it was terrifying. Your 外公 (maternal grandfather) was at work, so I carried your mom on my back and ran from our home in Yilan to get to a doctor in Taipei. We were on the wrong side of the train tracks, but I jumped across the tracks to get to the other side, even though the train almost ran me over. I didn’t care. I just knew I had to save my daughter.
“When I made it to Taipei, your grandpa met me there at the doctor’s house when it was already dark. But the doctor wouldn’t treat your mom. He said it was hopeless. Your grandpa and I knelt outside the doctor’s door for hours, begging him to save her life. Finally, he did, and your mom lived, but her leg was already paralyzed.”
When they all made it back home, my grandma said she held my three-year-old mother against her chest for three days, afraid to move—just to keep her warm.
“Of all my grandchildren, you and I know each other,” she has taken to saying in recent years. “When your dad was sick, it was just us. Your brother was too young, but you knew. We cried together.”
I stroke my grandma’s hand, spotted with age marks, the skin loose and soft over her bones—this hand that has raised six children, buried one of them as well as her husband, that has shaped dough into nourishment, and sewn clothes for my stuffed animals—and my chest aches with all the stories I’ll never know once she’s gone, the absence of a soul with whom I once wept in the dark.
I remember the first time I separated from my 外婆. I must have been six or seven at the time. She was going back to Taiwan for a visit, so my family dropped her off with my aunt in L.A. Perhaps because of my dad’s leukemia during my formative years, I feared separation. When I realised my grandma was leaving, I screamed like I would never see her again, clinging to her with all the strength of my little body. She tells the story sometimes, too, recalling how difficult it was to walk away.
We both know what it is to be ripped from the ones we love.
From her, I inherited a fighting spirit, a ferocity to protect my children and those I love. I carry her capacity for deep emotion.
Soon, the day will come when she will no longer ask me if I’ve eaten yet. And I wonder, when my old room is empty, when my children ask where great-grandma has gone, will I one day be able to answer, “Do you want something to eat (I love you)?”?
In my upcoming book, I write about grief and intergenerational love. Sign up here to be notified when it launches.
About Me: I’m Tiffany, a literary fiction, fantasy, and memoir author. My writing has been published by The Cultivation Project and Renewal Missions. I’ve been writing this publication, The Untangling, since 2023, which is a Substack bestseller. Order my books here.