This story touches on the darker side of life and death. It may come across as a little sad, even depressing. For a long time, I hesitated over whether I should write anything at all about the passing of the people on my side of the family who were closest to me. I refer to my two sets of grandparents, my parents and a paternal aunt who stayed with me right to the very end of her life. But then I thought, I had already touched on my paternal grandfather before, how he died and how his remains were taken to the funeral parlour. That was my very first personal brush with death in the family. I was nine years old, and the unpleasant experience terrified me. Having gone that far, perhaps I should write about the others too.
One ritual involved wiping my grandfather’s darkened face and symbolically feeding him rice, placing a few grains on his lips for his final journey. That moment, staring into his lifeless face, has stayed with me to this day.
During the funeral, we had to wear black, topped with the mua sah, the rough hemp mourning cloth. My father wore a matching headgear made from the same coarse material. All of this was meant to show outwardly the depth of grief, that the mourner no longer cared for comfort or appearance. After the funeral, we were required to mourn for three years: wearing black for the first year, black-and-white for the second, then white-and-blue for the third. No celebrations were allowed. No angpow during Chinese New Year. Rigid rules, but that was the way things were done then.
Less than three years later, on 11 February 1966, my maternal grandfather (Oh Joo Siew) passed away, 68 years old. Although we had not completed the mourning period for my paternal grandfather, my parents and I had to quickly tnooi ang, literally meaning return to red, before going back into mourning again.
Of the two, my maternal grandfather was my favourite. He doted on me and much later, on my young cousin Irene. In the evenings, he would take me to a nearby Indian sundry shop. I was happy with the simplest things: sweets, crackers, biscuits. In return, I became very attached to him. So when he died, I was devastated. Just the day before his death, he was carrying his one- or two-year-old granddaughter happily in his arms. He could no longer walk while carrying her, having suffered from a mild stroke the year before. And that was the last time he ever held Irene.
At about five in the morning, my grandmother woke the family to say he was not responding to her call. We rushed downstairs to see him laying still on the bed. I shook him, beseeching him to call me, but all we heard was a gurgling sound from his throat. That was all. A massive stroke had taken him. Soon after, my mother’s sister arrived. She fell to her knees and crawled into the house, wailing that she would never see him again. That set my mother off again, though she had already been crying earlier.
Since he died at home, the wake was held in the house. The living room furniture was cleared, pictures removed, altars and mirrored surfaces covered with red paper. His body was placed on a narrow bed behind makeshift curtains. The curtains were drawn but if I climbed the stairs behind the living room to go upstairs, I could still look down at my grandfather's body. The coffin came the next day, and then there were the Taoist rites. My mother and aunt took turns kneeling beside the curtains, burning joss paper piece by piece, their mourning interrupted by fresh wails whenever relatives came. I was supposed to kneel and receive them as they entered, such was the custom.
As my grandfather hadn't any son, there was nobody in the immediate family to wear the mua sah during the funeral. Instead one of his nephews in Penang, his elder brother's son, stepped in to wear this rough hemp clothing and also carry the tong huan or paper lantern. For the year-long mourning period, we were wearing only black-and-white, which was comparatively a more relaxed requirement than my earlier experience.
Soon after, my paternal grandmother (Lim Poh Choo) and aunt moved in with us at Seang Tek Road. She was already unwell and my father wanted her nearby. For a time, both my grandmothers lived under the same roof, a rather unusual arrangement.
But my paternal grandmother’s condition worsened. She tried all sorts of treatments, including an enema to unblock her bowels, but it only left her weaker than before. By early 1967, just before Chinese New Year, it was clear she would not last. On the night she died at the age of 62, on the sixth of February, my maternal grandmother decided to go stay with her other daughter to avoid the inevitable, but it was too late. Just as she reached the door, my mother’s wails drifted down from upstairs. She was trapped, and had to remain in the house through the funeral process.
Because it was so close to Chinese New Year, few relatives came and we couldn't fault anyone for that. It was a quiet affair except for the obligatory wails by my mother and paternal aunt. The funeral took place on the eve of the Chinese New Year and that night, as neighbours lit firecrackers and celebrated, our doorway had no red cloth and our lantern remained unlit. My father and I sat on the five-foot way and watched in silence.
This time, we completed the mourning period of one year. After that came the tnooi ang ritual. A cleansing bath, followed by the sin tok or pouring scented water and seven-coloured flowers over the head before changing into red clothes.
In the mid-1970s, we moved to Lorong Zoo Tiga in Ayer Itam. I can’t recall the exact year, maybe 1974 or 1975. The landlord of the row of four Seang Tek Road houses wanted them back. All the tenants resisted but eventually, we had to leave. We moved in with my maternal grandmother’s sister. Space was tight. My parents, aunt, sister Judy and I crammed into one room, while my grandmother (Tan Kim Lean) shared another with her sister's daughter.
It was there that she passed away on 16 August 1980, aged 79. She had long suffered from weak lungs. On that day, her breathing finally failed and she collapsed on the bed in my mother's arms. I remember that on the first night of the wake, there was a power failure. The house was in darkness, lit only by a pair of candles at my grandmother's feet. Immediately my mind raced back to that funeral parlour in Hutton Lane in 1963 when shadows danced on the wall. When the lights came back, I felt a huge sense of relief. By the time of her passing, mourning customs in Penang were already beginning to shift. Some of the older, more rigid practices were being relaxed. For instance, the wearing of black-and-white was shortened to about 100 days, a more practical arrangement for modern times.
There is one small incident I should mention. There is a Taoist belief that the soul lingers until the seventh day, not fully aware that it has departed the physical shell. The living cannot see it, but there may be signs of its presence. On the fifth day after her passing, two days after the funeral, most of the family had gone out. Only my sister, my paternal aunt and I were at home. My sister, as usual, started talking her light-hearted nonsense, even making jokes about our grandmother. Suddenly, from the back of the house, there was a loud crash of pots and pans falling to the floor. We froze. Then my sister started crying. Was it coincidence? Or was our departed grandmother cross about the jokes and wanted to show her displeasure? We shall never know for sure.
I think I’ve gone on long enough for now. There are still more to say, but perhaps I’ll leave those for another time when I feel ready to return to this topic.
NOTE: This story is part of my reminiscence series which I've been adding to my blog once in a while. The series is meant to document things I remember about my younger and childhood days; my important memories, which may be pretty mundane to other people, to pass down to my son and daughter. Life as it used to be in the 1950s to 1970s, perhaps into the 1990s. But let's see how it goes...
#seangtekroad
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