By Arathi Devandran
There is a particular irony in the kindness we reserve for the dead.
Take my mother’s family, for example. They save their best tenderness for those who are no longer around to receive it, with the weeping, the gathering, the annual prayers and the grand tombstones. When my grandmother, Aatha, was still alive, bedridden for years as dementia slowly took her away from the land of the living, she was largely left to the quiet, exhausted devotion of my aunt. The one child, out of the eight, who stayed. Many of them only really appeared to mourn Aatha with great feeling, when she was gone.
I have been trying to understand this for many years now. I think it has something to do with the fact that grief is legible. It has a script, a set of gestures, a social permission, while love, the daily unglamourous kind, does not. We do not have good language for tending to the difficult, complicated people in our lives while they are still here. We struggle to hold the simmering resentment that comes with prolonged caregiving and the guilt of watching death slowly reach for someone we love. We struggle, so we disassociate. And we wait. When they are gone, when they are finally dead, we feel freed to perform our feelings that we could not manage to express while it still mattered.
Aatha died on 2 October 2021. I was in the US, as were my parents, who had come to stay with me while my husband was away. At 6a.m. that morning, I stumbled out of bed to a strange wailing in the air. My little dog was whining frantically. In the living room, my mother lay sprawled on the couch, near catatonic, while my father was rubbing her back. Aatha has stopped breathing, my mother’s words were garbled. The paramedics have just arrived.
Soon after, when Aatha arrived at the hospital, they declared her dead. Months later, my aunt would tell me that she had intuited Aatha’s passing, long before the paramedics were called.
My mother fainted when she heard the news. My ears were roaring.
Things have to happen when people die – administrative things. And we were miles away from all of it, as Aatha and the rest of my mother’s family were in Singapore. The pandemic was still raging; international travel was complicated and limited. Returning travelers had to face stringent rules in Singapore; they would have to serve a ten-day quarantine on return, it would take my parents two days to get back to Singapore because of the time difference between the two countries, and the funeral had to happen soon because dead bodies cannot be preserved for too long.
In my ears, there was still that roaring, while I made phone calls, found out about provisions for compassionate travel, more phone calls to authorities both in the US and in Singapore. My grief, a balloon I swallowed while I dealt with wailing aunts, wailing uncles, wailing cousins. So much wailing, so much noise.
The balloon of sadness grew in me as I made the conscious decision not to return to Singapore for the funeral. I knew that if I did go back, that I would not have been given the space to grieve Aatha the way that I wanted to, befitting of the quality of love she had showered upon me most of my life.
The balloon grew even more as I sent my parents off at the airport and returned home.
Alone, it burst. The grief shrieked like a banshee. And with the grief, came anger.
Watching the funeral proceedings through a makeshift livestream, I watched my family gather and perform their grief. I wondered, where was all this familial love when she was alive? Where had the support been for her caretaking, which had fallen entirely on my aunt, who had given up so many daily luxuries so that she could be Aatha’s primary caretaker? The cousins and aunts and uncles now publicly lamenting this loss – where had they been during the years Aatha needed to be fed, to be held, to have simply known she had not been forgotten?
This is the shape of so many families, I think. Not uniquely cruel or negligent but somehow trapped within this vicious nexus of selfishness and socio-cultural hierarchies that make it easier for people to show up for death than for life. We are taught the rituals of mourning. We are not taught, with anywhere near the same care, how to sit with the difficulty of loving someone whose needs are inconvenient, whose decline is unglamorous, or maybe whose complicated history with us makes the love feel tangled and hard.
Intergenerational relationships in particular seem to resist articulation. There is no vocabulary handed down for how to love an ageing parent when your relationship with them has always been fraught. There is no cultural script for how to be present for a grandmother who favoured the child that stole from her, or an uncle whose ego consumed the family’s peace for decades, or an aunt whose sacrifices everyone silently depended upon while loudly overlooking. The relationships are real and irreducible and often painful, and yet we are expected to show up at the funeral and weep as though none of that history exists. As though grief were simple. As though love ever is.
My extended family decided that Aatha should be buried. I raged about this too, from my solitude. Why bury her, when no one in the family goes to the cemetery? There were already three other graves, that of my grandfather, my eldest step-uncle, and my grand-aunt, that had been all but abandoned for thirty years. In all this time, the only people who had tended to those tombstones were my parents: two people, in their 70s, braving the heat and the mosquitoes and the long drives to the far ends of the island, quietly faithfully paying their respects. My mother has seven other siblings. The family in its totality numbers perhaps 50 or 60 people across four generations. And still: two people.
When they were debating the type of tombstone Aatha should have, the consensus was that it must be grand, majestic. I laughed until I cried.
For Aatha’s first death anniversary, my husband and I were in Singapore. I had just been diagnosed with cancer, and we had recently returned from the US to rebuild our life back home. It was the first time I visited Aatha’s grave. My heart was in pieces.
Yet, her death anniversary was celebrated with real joy – loudly, warmly, with food and people and in the way Aatha herself had lived her life: feeding people, showering uncomplicated love wherever she went.
I only wish we, all of us, had done more of this while she was still here to enjoy and understand it.
These days, my husband and I join my parents in grave sweeping. The total tally of the guardians of the tombstones has effectively doubled. We go many times a year, always with sweets and murukku and agarbathi and sambrani [1]and flowers and food. We clean out the weeds. We wash the gravestones with panneer[2]. We lay out the food on fresh banana leaves. We pray, we smile, we get bitten by mosquitoes. Sometimes, my aunt joins us, and we make a quiet outing of it afterwards.
Each visit to the cemetery, we see something beautiful: a wild boar’s eye winking from the undergrowth; a large eagle swooping silently overhead; a flower that has no business growing in a cemetery among the weeds, but there it is. Aatha was a naturalist, a woman with earth magic in her hands. I choose to believe these are her way of telling us she sees us. That she is happy.
I don’t have a clean resolution for any of this. I am still angry, in a low, intermittent way, at a family that did not know how to show up for someone until she was beyond receiving. I am still sad about the years my aunt spent largely alone in her devotion. I am still unsure what to do with the frustration I feel toward the people who loved her badly, because I know that love badly given, is still, often love. That families cannot be easily typecasted as villains, that we are often the by-product of inherited patterns we did not choose.
I will not be lying when I say that I am trying to let the anger go. I acknowledge the injustice of Aatha’s life and death, and then I try to release it into the wilderness. She was not an angry woman, for all the terrible things she witnessed and went through in her life. If her blood runs in my veins, then perhaps, slowly, so can her grace.
In the meantime, I try to practice what I think she was quietly modelling all along: to be kinder to the living than to the dead; to show up before it is too late; to say the things, do the things, cook the food and sit beside the person and make it to the thing, not because death is coming, but because life is already here.
[1] Murruku – snack
Agarbathi – Incense stick
Sambrani – aromatic resin
[2] Panneer – rose water
Arathi Devandran is a Singapore-based writer whose work explores identity, culture, and politics. Her writing has appeared in CNA, Singapore At Home: Life Across Lines, and RIC Journal, among others. She is on substack at https://abookotheheart.substack.com/
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