Grandpa

My Grandpa was diagnosed with liver cancer last year.

Just when everything was churning along fine, dialysis sessions marked with black squares on a calendar, medication packed according to days in a box, he suffered a stroke earlier this year.

Everything became oddly irrelevant then.

The first few weeks were the hardest. Furniture was moved away, ramps installed and rooms cleared to make for the safe passage of a wheelchair bound person. It's especially hard to see the one person who saw you grow up cry because he thinks he has become " a liability".

Today is the first time I went to the hospital with my grandpa for his weekly physiotherapy sessions. I don't know what kept me from going for so long but this morning I found myself with my grandpa on the long walk towards the physiotherapy room. My grandma, who tirelessly comes every time, mused that it's the exercise before the exercise.

The first thing my grandpa does upon reaching the room is to introduce me as his grandson, his smile lighting up the entire ward. The nurses there acted as if they have seen me a thousand times before, waved me hi,told me where to put my bag and found somewhere for me to sit.

The physiotherapist who attended to my grandpa is a cheerful lady named Lee Mei.Through some chit-chat I found out that she is actually the cousin of one of the members of NUSWS, which in itself, I think is an amazing coincidence.

For the first exercise Lee Mei asked my grandpa to write on the glass window, something I find rather surreal, like a scene of out a beautiful mind. His right hand gripped the marker and scribbled his and my mum's name on the window. Upon prompting from Lee Mei my grandpa did something I had never seen before - he wrote his Chinese name.

And at that at moment my mum came.

" Your uncle asked you to come ah?"

"No. I came on my own."

And I am glad I did.