Why I Swim
I have my mother to thank for getting me into the habit of swimming.
It was one of many skills she wanted me to hone in her hopes of making me an All-Star Asian Child. Drama! Piano! Violin! Ballet! Art class! — if you can name it, she most definitely tried to sign me up for it. For what it’s worth, I really enjoyed my weekly lessons with my swimming coach, whom I addressed as “Uncle Vincent” even though we were not related.
One day, when I was five years old, I swam hard into the wall of a pool (for reasons I cannot fathom), and hurt my gums and cracked my teeth. Uncle Vincent and my mum placated me, traumatised and bloodied, with a lollipop that was nice to hold, but could not be enjoyed because of the bloodied gums. I still remember the moment I had with myself as everyone started to pack up and leave the pool to head home. The sun was setting; the air was still. I stared hard at the orange-flavoured lollipop in my hand, then back at the pool, and swore I would never step into another pool again.
That incident was also one of the last memories I have of my mum as a living, lively being. One stormy September night in the mid-nineties, she had an asthma attack that went horribly wrong, and it left her in a comatose state for the next four and half years.
My weekly swimming lessons were soon replaced by weekly visits to the nursing home that she stayed at for most of that time. My dad, younger brother and I would read bags of library books out loud by her bedside, hoping she might show signs of life beyond breathing and blinking. We received many thoughts and prayers from well-meaning people who hoped praying would help awaken her from this long coma — but praying didn’t help and she remained steadily unwell.
Seventeen days after she turned forty, she had a bout of pneumonia that she never recovered from, and died.
The day she passed away remains clear as day: I woke up early, all ready and excited for a science field trip, but before I could change into my school uniform, my dad calmly told me and my brother that we would not have to go to school for the rest of the week as “mummy has gone to a better place”. Where that “better place” was, was a mystery to me.
After her funeral, I spent months reading endless Chicken Soups for the Soul to try to understand if it was okay to not be sad about losing someone I barely knew. Truth be told, I wasn’t sad about growing up without a mum until I was in my late teenage-hood and twenties. “Complicated grief” is the term my therapist uses to describe what I was experiencing. It was complicated because I spent half of my childhood witnessing my mum’s slow-motion-decline and sudden absence — without really processing what all of that meant.
One way I probably did try to process everything though was through swimming. Despite the traumatic accident to my five-year-old self, I found myself going back to the pool in my late teens — first, as an attempt to live a “more active life” (in the words of society and my doctor), but it also evolved to become a calming ritual, amid all the seemingly never ending questions, concerns and dramas that staccato one’s life.
Swimming essentially helped me to slow down time — a commodity that my mother ran out of. My routine largely consisted of doing five breaststroke laps, then another five free-style laps before ending off with one slower-paced breaststroke lap — all neatly done in half an hour, that was mine alone to enjoy.
But it didn’t singlehandedly remove the emotional weight that certain calendar months had on me, or fail to remind me that I was slowly inching towards the age when my mum fell sick. March, for example, became such an anticipatory month because two dates were etched into it: my mum’s birthday and her death anniversary. I spent years and years wondering endlessly if her not falling sick would have set me off on a different life path. Is it bad that I don’t wear make-up and don’t care much for it? Am I girly enough? Would she have approved of this boy that I liked? Is it okay if I focus on my career and not settle down at the age she did? Have I done enough in my life? Would she have asked me to pierce my ears when I was thirteen? (They remain unpierced to this day.)
Recently, during the pandemic, the month of March became even more emotionally fraught. My paternal grandma — who abruptly stepped in to help raise me and my brother in 1995 — succumbed to old age, dementia and pneumonia in March 2021. In the days that followed her death, I wondered out loud if the powers that be were playing one big joke on my family in bequeathing another sombre date to an already difficult month.
This year, I decided to do things a bit differently by booking a trip to South Korea for the month of March for a working vacation of sorts. It’s hard to describe it, but I had an impulse to not let my grieving process feel so concentrated in one fixed calendar month or one location.
I spent a few days in the southern city of Busan and walked along several coastal trails to see and hear another body of water that never fails to provide me much calm — the vast blue ocean.
On one particular trip to Taejongdae Resort Park in south-western Busan, I was so thrilled to see cherry blossoms that were beginning to bloom — something I think my grandma would have loved to have seen. I sent a picture of them to my dad and texted, “I just wanted to say I am very grateful for my health and ability to travel. Today has really been so wonderful.” To which, my dad replied with two thumbs up and two praying emojis.
While he remains a man of very few words (but now, of many emojis), his response made me think more about our whole shared experience with my mum; his own navigation of grief when he first lost my mum, and when he lost his own mum over twenty years later.
My dad was only thirty-five when my mum fell sick, and he spent the second half of his thirties caring for her. He worked long hours, driving back and forth between his law firm’s offices in Singapore and Malaysia, while dealing with a lot of family drama that was largely related to his caregiving duties.
He also tried his best to be a present dad, and was the complete opposite of my mum in being a non-Tiger Father. Take, for instance, me getting a ‘B’ for some English test when I was eight years old. I knew, there and then, that my mum would not have been happy with this grade, but my father comforted a hysterical and visibly upset me, and told me that I had done my best. Or my decision to read history at university — my dad was largely supportive (“I guess you could be a teacher”). In an alternate universe, I think my mum would have objected to my desire to dive into Third World histories, presumably because being a history graduate meant that I might not automatically become an All-Star Asian Student or Professional.
But crucially, above every tangible duty and concern he was grappling with during those years, my dad probably tried his best not to fall into a deep depression, because who wouldn’t when life throws you such a big fucking curveball like that?
These days, swimming reminds me of my own mortality, and what I can or can’t push my body to do. But it is now often accompanied with yoga classes — a new routine that has taught me to measure my breath and time more slowly.
While my swimming routine has remained largely unchanged, the last breaststroke lap I make is always a favourite, because it leads to a ritual of just standing still in the water for a moment or two, or floating belly-up as I look at the morning or evening sky.
Moments like these make me think about how grief used to envelop me the way water does, and I marvel at the possibility of outliving my mum. I think she’d be happy to know that I stuck with swimming in the end, and that her kids really did turn out all right.
