It’s not quite all systems go, but y’all can start expecting more content on this new thing I’m tryin out:
Yen Feng Online (http://www.yenfeng.com)
Drop in, say hi, tell me you hate it, you love it, you wanna buy me a cocktail!
So much has changed, but a few things remain constant. I still miss you. I love you, and thank you - for the good ol’ days we lived together, and for every new one on the horizon.
On this day, I want to thank also the many other melanoma patients who fought the cancer with us.
These are the people who make up the members of http://mpip.org/, an online resource for the melanoma community.
Between 2004 and 2007, Rusty and I were active members. We learned from other patients alternative drug options, treatment side effects, as well as obtained contacts for specialist doctors who had treated others on the website.
We cried, and celebrated together. These are the people who knew what it meant exactly to live our days.
A few members have dedicated a post to Rusty today. If you want to read some of the comments, you can click here:
By Pablo Neruda
I would like not to know, not to dream.
Who could show me how not to be,
how to live without going on living?
How does water continue?
What heaven do stones have?
Still, at the point where migrating birds
hang in their apogee,
and then fly on in their arrows
to the icy archipelago.
Still, with a secret life
like a subterranean city,
and the days sliding by
like ever escaping drops;
nothing exhausted or dying
on the way to our rebirth,
to our own return to life
in the steps of the buried spring,
of all that lay deep and lost,
interminably still,
and which now swims up from unbeing
to become a branch in flower.
Happy birthday, Rusty.
The initial energy and positive thinking I brought with me to Singapore two months ago has whittled. Life, measured hour after hour, is barely manageable. To eat, or not eat; sleep or not sleep. At least Hamlet sought an answer. Mine - to his august question - makes no difference to me.
To say that I have hit rock bottom is not true. I have not, and I cannot imagine returning to that dark time. Instead, I am suspended at its margins. I walk above the reassuring pull of earth’s gravity. I lie under a sky from which no stars bewitch the imagination. There is a sense of disconnect between my tangible self, and the self that wanders like a shadow. This morning, I looked into the mirror and smiled, and I did not recognize myself.
I have spent months striving. If I cannot be happy, then at least, let me be calm.
Three years ago, we celebrated our first Valentine’s Day together. It was three months after we’d met. We exchanged presents. He bought me a facial at Nickel, an upscale men’s spa in New York; I bought him a bag of weed through a classmate who dealt out of his fraternity house.
“This is the best Valentine’s Day present, ever!” he whooped, and fished out the bong.
After an hour, we were both hands deep in bags of Doritos on our couch. Jon Stewart was on. I always remember his laugh this way: he rubs his fists into his eyes, and laughs so hard he can’t stop.
A year later, we had left New York, and were in different cities. He was in Seoul. I was in Singapore. On Feb 14, I called him at night when he got home. All afternoon he had been hooked up to tubes and needles at Samsung Hospital, getting his chemotherapy. “Happy Valentine’s Day, my love,” I said to him. He was too tired to say much: “I thought about you all day. I miss you.”
We hung up and went to our separate beds, full of words we didn’t say.
Back in New York the following year, our last Valentine’s Day was spent together watching the sun rise from a hospital uptown. He, on the thin bed. I, in the chair next to him. His left hand, heavy with sleep, rested in mine.
At New York Presbyterian Hospital, he had just endured six days of high-dose immunotherapy. By the fourth day, the chemo had taken his mind. He asked for the Indians to stop knocking on our door. He wanted to see the circus at North Carolina. He no longer knew who I was. On Valentine’s Day, our seventh day at the hospital, he finally woke from his nightmare.
When I opened my eyes that morning, he was already awake.
“Hey baby, how long have I been sleeping?” he asked me.
“Not long,” I said. “Happy Valentine’s Day, my love.” I leaned across and kissed him on the cheek. “What day is it?” he asked. “Wednesday.” I looked at the clock on the wall. 6 am. I’d slept a few hours.
This is what I wrote on that day:
“For the next 10 minutes, we chat a little in the dark. He is full of questions, gaining strength in lucid conversation. His eyes come alert. He’s finally turning the corner, I think to myself. In the window, shadows peel away. A band of mauve is on the horizon. It is almost daylight.”
Another year has passed. Happy Valentine’s Day, my love. It’s four in the morning. I’m tired, but I can’t sleep. Are you awake, too? I thought about you all day. I miss you.
Nine months
It was in that moment, when Rusty died, that death became possible for me, too.
I wasn’t suicidal; I did not want to make myself dead. I merely wanted to be dead with him.
That first thought filled me, as I stood next to him, not knowing to speak, or move; I, whom to myself seemed suddenly misplaced, and oddly living. It came to me quickly: there was death’s door. It became clear that if he could die, so I could, too.
He was so freshly present, I thought: I could follow him.
Death is our most common experience. Every person will come to know the pain of loss. Every person will die. Losing someone is not the same as experiencing death, but it can come close. There are those who live, but carry the dead next to their hearts. We call them the grieving.
For to experience such closeness with death is beyond the scope of mortality, or the display of sadness. It is something quieter. There is no excess to its expression; the hurricane drops. It is to know that when death opens its door, to step through it is as insignificant an idea as the act is uneventful, as if a leaf turning on the ground.
I was 16 when my uncle died. I did not know death then. Nor did I, when my grandmother died a year later, and my grandfather a year after that.
Death had happened; it was all around me. But in those relationships, death was still not real to me. The pain I felt did not change me. I did not let it touch me.
It was different with Rusty. I became a widower. Death became plausible. To know that I could die was my first thought; that I should, my second.
To know death is to await it, without hesitation, without fear. The unknown is known, because the grieving see in everything its shadow, hear in every word its song. We call out for the dead to give us answers. We are not so much haunted as we are sustained by specters. We endure time, not because living is difficult, but because it has become, for us, a provisional exercise.
And it is not possible - when a spouse, a child, or a parent dies - not to live this double self, because if the dead are still a part of us, even while they are part of death, then death is a part of us, too.
Our past interred in the present; that is how we keep our dead.
It is nine months since Rusty died. I have lived through the worst of it. In the last month, I’ve even achieved a likeness to life: work, food, friends. Sleep is more fickle. It is at night, when the day grows old, that I come home to Rusty, and in spite of my exhaustion, I cannot shut the door.
There are days I wonder if it will ever close. I am not impatient, but my eyes still struggle to see what lies beyond it, to see on the other side if Rusty is waiting for me, as I am for him.
And so the hours are counted down, neither one easier, nor more difficult than the next.
When the day finally comes for me to cross over, I shall do so with much trembling. It will come willingly, or unwillingly. My eyes will be closed; not for fearing death, but for the joy of feeling, once again, his fingers running through my hair.
Eight months
One of the tenets I live by since the fact is to remind myself that I am not, nor will I be, imprisoned by his death.
This idea implies strength, but more importantly, choice. Choice is an important word in my journey. It was my choice to see Rusty through the cancer, to stick it out; in other words, to love him. It was my choice to see him die. In the months after his death, I still choose; in spite of my grief, I choose joy, gratitude, freedom. I cling on to these words.
But I am not so strong to choose every day.
Nor should I feel the need to, I realize. After all these months, I continue to be humbled by the largeness of these feelings that stay with me. To say “I choose,” implies that I am able to best my emotions. I now understand that I am not. It has taken me this long to realize that to say “I choose,” ignores a fundamental lesson in death: when you lose a husband, you will never stop feeling sad.
I have often said in my writings that I must learn to live with my grief, to understand its peaks and valleys, to make a map of it so I may better locate myself in the journey of what life remains for me. With love as my light, I would mark on this map the traps of sorrow and anger. By acquainting myself with its terrain I would not be overcome by the strangeness of my circumstance. Implicit in my resolve was to discover, eventually, a road that would lead a way out.
There is no “out.”
In other words, I have stopped trying to escape my sorrow. I don’t believe I will stop grieving. The dichotomies with which I chose to live by after his death - joy and sorrow, gratitude and despair, freedom and imprisonment - to persuade myself that I could choose one over the other - no longer make sense to me.
I am bound to this sorrow as love’s consequence. A time ago I would have been overcome by the weight of this admission; I feared it. Now I feel strong enough to bear it.
I know some day my sorrow will leave room for another man. I know beyond grief’s boundaries lies for me some remainder of life’s sweetness. Part of that comes from knowing I still have love to give. But to receive love, to seek it, I still cannot. Quite plainly, I am not wanting.
So for now, I choose to be sad. I am no longer afraid of it. My sorrow has no hold over me.
Since I started work, every night I take a taxi from the office back to my apartment. In the 20-minute ride, I let myself grieve, without a sound. Every night, my companion is different. We ride in silence, and by the time he pulls up to my building, I feel lighter, and still more loved than ever.
Merry Christmas, Rusty
The plane landed. From Changi International Airport, I hailed down a taxi, and gave the driver the address of my parents’ apartment. I didn’t realize how much I had been holding back until the driver asked me: “Are you coming home, sir?”
I didn’t see it coming; I was overcome.
Where is home?
In the years Rusty and I were together, we had several - and in different cities: New York, Seoul, Singapore. During doctors’ appointments and between rounds of chemotherapy, home was refuge in hotels, friends’ houses and hospitals. We were always taking trips, if not for the cancer, then to take short vacations from it. But most of the time, we would be flying to see each other; until the last six months we spent in New York together, we had lived mostly apart in Asia: he in Seoul, I in Singapore.
To live at one time so entwined with someone, yet separate from his person, was difficult. At night, alone in bed, to have our heartache consoled by each other’s voices, yet not by its curing warmth - that was punishing. In the year of lost touch, each reunion, each embrace, was the prize of our longing: in all the trips I took to see him, waiting at the interminable terminals, walking from gate to gate, one, and only one thought sustained me:
I am finally coming home to my man.
After all our days apart, it was always knowing I would soon rest by the hearth of his body that kept me going. I longed for the clasp of his chin, the pillow of his chest, the quiet breathing we’d learned - after so many years of fighting - to be grateful for. The moment he takes me in his arms, I am safe; and in the nascent light of departing shadows, I know it without doubt, and beyond question: I am home.
After he died, I vanished into our apartment in New York. For days I was unable to leave the bedroom. I slept on the same side of our bed. I searched for his smell in the sheets; I crawled into imaginary nooks, positions I learned by heart to remind myself the shape of his body. It was no use; I had never felt more homeless.
In the past year, an aspect of my grieving process was to find for myself a new home. In the first blur of grief, I sought it in the unknowing hands of men I solicited in bars and on the Internet. I was desperate for impersonations of love, no matter how unconvincing, or poorly rendered to life.
Each man who came into my bed was unfamiliar to my body; our limbs pieces of jigsaw that didn’t fit.
It took time, before perspective gave clarity to my wounds. I began to see that no man held the salve to my pain. I realized the haven for my anguish I pursued with such dogged blindness was no further than the tip of my nose. It was me: I was my new home.
Guided by that epiphany, I decided all that I had left of Rusty wasn’t the apartment, or the clothes and books he left behind, or the letters, or the ring he gave me the week before he died to seal our rendezvous in the afterlife. What he left for me instead was a country filled with the domiciles of our love. His love would be my shelter until the time came for me to join him in our final home.
I held my tears until I stepped out of the taxi and pulled my suitcases into the apartment. It was 7am. My parents were still asleep. Quietly I lay down on the couch and searched in my mind again the feel of Rusty’s body behind me - his arm around my waist, his hand I hold to my lips. It was then, carrying all of him in my heart, that I heard him say to me: I had not lost a home. I had now become one for him.
“What is your ideal last meal?”
This was the question posed by reporter Serene Lim to seven renowned chefs in Singapore in the most recent issue of 8 Days magazine. In the article, Ms Lim asked the chefs, among them including Messrs. Eric Teo of The Mandarin Hotel, Edward Voon of Aurum, and Willin Low of Wild Rocket, what their ideal last meal would be, and why.
The point of the article, though unsurprising, is a good one. At the end of the day, what these truffle-hoarding and foie gras-packing cooks yearn for is a dish brewed with love and steeped in old memories. The best chefs, in their collective opinion, are mothers and wives.
“Nostalgia plays a big part in how I view food,” said Mr Low, 45, whose last meal he hoped would be his mother’s cabbage porridge with dried shrimp, mushrooms and minced meat. “It’s a powerful substance which brings you back to a particular time and space.”
To others, what ends up on the plate is less important than the hands that put it together.
“Any fish dish prepared by my wife,” said Mr Ronnie Chia of Tatsuya. Added the 40-year-old, whose Japanese restaurant ranks among the top in Singapore: “If it’s your last meal, don’t you want a loved one to be cooking for you?”
We respond to food - the smell of it, its color and flavors - in the most visceral way. Food moves our bodies, but it also nurtures memory. You don’t have to be a critic to remember how a dish made you feel. In a way, it is the most complex of emotional triggers - put aside your paintings, songs and letters - nothing quite warms the soul as food prepared especially for you by a loved one.
I was unprepared for the emotions that welled up as I read Ms Lim’s article. I remembered in the last weeks of Rusty’s life how food, or the lack of it, had become an indicator of his dying body. I watched with horror his bones jut out from under his skin, tracing their sharp edges against his jaw-line, ribs and elbows. He had not eaten in days, and when I asked him if he were hungry, he replied, as if it were the most reasonable answer:
“But I already ate two slices of cucumber.”
Two nights before he died, I made for him a meal of steamed halibut, with a dash of white wine, sesame oil and lemon juice. I served it with his favorite tea - mint with cucumber and honey. He ate only half of it, but it was the most he had eaten in over a month. As he sat in his chair, pushing each small bite into his shrunken body, I was overcome with joy and despair. I knew he was eating to make me happy. “It’s so good, baby,” he whispered to me from across the room. He raised his thumb up. He winked at me.
I did all I could from breaking down. That was Rusty’s last meal.
The day he died, I couldn’t stop worrying if he would have enough to eat, or drink. I wondered in the days after the fact who, among the angels and demons, would make sure he had his water by his bed, or a slice of toast for him in the mornings. The idea of a “last meal” was blocked from my mind. Of course, of course, he still needed to eat.
Since then, I’ve grown sensitive to many different foods, all flavored with the memory of our lives together. Not a moment slips by - in restaurants, in friends’ apartments, or at home - as I’m eating, do I not think of Rusty, and wonder if this or that dish is something he would like, or not. I now eat for the both of us. In this small way, I continue to nourish the memory of the man I love, and take some comfort knowing he has yet, and never will, come to taste his last meal without me.