Errands

For the first year after my grandma passed away, my grandpa went to her grave at least once a week, sometimes twice. Now he no longer goes that often, but every three weeks or so, my Uncle Jin will drive Grandpa fifteen miles from Cerritos to the sprawling Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier, California, neither man speaking much in the car. On these days, my uncle’s white Toyota Sienna, purchased over a decade ago and still in excellent condition thanks to my uncle’s meticulous care, can be seen winding its way up the groomed, curved road of the cemetery, turning right up just one of many rolling green hills to stop just before the white, futuristic-looking Memorial Chapel, where grandma’s funeral was held two Novembers ago. My uncle always parks by a trashcan. Together, father and son walk carefully down three yards or so, to grandma’s grave.

The cemetery is often mistaken for a golf course but people in the surrounding cities know better. From atop the hill where grandma is buried, the view is pleasant. I’m not certain which direction the hill faces — it could be north towards El Monte, east towards Rowland Heights, or west towards Los Angeles — but the hill rises just high enough so you feel you’re above the hazy line of pollution that hovers over both the living and the dead.

When we buried grandma, Grandpa had nodded towards the view, commenting that it was a good thing my aunt Joannie had had the foresight to buy the plots early, just a few years after she came to the States from Taipei.

“The early bird gets the view,” he had said, or something like that.

Now, despite Grandpa’s less frequent visits, there are always flowers in the little metal vase provided by the cemetery. There’s one in front of every tombstone: a little hole in the grass so that the flowers appear to be growing from the ground. If the flowers are not left by Uncle Jin and Grandpa, then they were by Uncle Jimmy. If not by uncle Jimmy, then by Aunt Joannie or cousin Angela or Wendy or Kathryn or whomever else took the time to make the drive, to spend a few minutes with a stone and a memory.

After they refresh the flowers and take in the now-familiar view, Grandpa and Uncle Jin say a few words to Grandma then head back to the car. Usually, Uncle Jin drives Grandpa home. But every three or four weeks, Uncle Jin drives further north, another ten miles to Temple City, a Chinatown comprised of dilapidated strip malls with stores and Chinese restaurants frequented mostly by the local elderly, who live in the surrounding convalescent and retirement homes, and their visiting children, some willing, some not. In one such strip mall, there is a seafood restaurant with dingy tablecloths and algae-covered fish tanks filled with fresh but lethargic seafood. They offer an excellent lunch special: order three dishes and get another for just $1.99. Soup and rice included. Father and son dine on too much food — Grandpa likes a whole fried flounder, Uncle Jin likes the cold, slow braised chicken. The bill hardly ever comes out to be more than $25. They pack up the rest for dinner, tomorrow’s lunch and probably tomorrow’s dinner, and drive another mile or so to another strip mall where the Every Beauty Salon is situated.

A dim, run-down establishment with chipped mirrors, torn barber seats, and fading posters of chiseled eighties models with outdated hairstyles, the Every Beauty Salon makes most of its money from Chinese men, mostly old, like my grandfather. Grandpa likes the price almost as much as he likes the price for lunch. A haircut for a man his age starts at $5. A slapdash dye job to hide white hair starts at $12, depending on how much hair the client has. A man might leave with more than a few missed hairs or more dye on his scalp than upon his strands, but for twelve dollars he’s going for the overall effect, the “don’t stand too close to me and it looks fine” effect. The men who frequent Every Beauty Salon are not vain. They are not looking for everlasting beauty. Well over the hill and heading for the bottom, they are looking for a good deal. They want to keep the hair off their necks and out of their eyes; they want to keep their comb-overs manageable. They want to look presentable when their kids and grandkids visit.

Those days are long, when Grandpa and Uncle Jin go from cemetery to restaurant to salon and perhaps to the Chinese Grocery Megastore. Uncle Jin prefers to leave grandpa’s house by 10AM, be at the cemetery at 10:30. Lunch at 11AM followed by the salon and groceries and then the long drive back on the perpetually congested 5 freeway. If traffic cooperates, Grandpa can be at home, napping by one, one-thirty PM and Uncle Jin can be at the Chinese school he runs with my mother, his older sister, less than five minutes later.

A few weeks ago I was home in California when Uncle Jin called

“Are you free tomorrow morning?”

I hesitated, having an idea of what was coming. I had just two more days left at home — Friday and Saturday — before returning to New York to start school.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I wanted to see if you’ll visit Grandma with me and Grandpa. After, we can have lunch together.”

I did not want to go. I had just two days left, each hour of which I could think of a hundred things I’d rather do than go to a cemetery I’d been to too often. I wanted to swim and read back issues of travel magazines. I wanted to laze about in my soft bed. I wanted to play golf with my mother and walk around my parents’ big Southern California house because I had the space and hang out with old friends. I wanted to fix my own lunch. I did not want to drive nor be driven to an ugly inland city whose greatest expanse of beauty was a too-carefully groomed cemetery where even the grass looked sterile. I had gone enough; I never wanted to go again. Mostly, I did not want to see my grandpa looking at his wife’s grave. Mostly, I did not want to be sad.

“Okay,” I said.

I did not know it was going to be one of those long days. My uncle Jin kept this information from me, knowing I would not have come along if he’d said, “After the cemetery we’ll get lunch and a haircut and groceries.” It wasn’t until we’d refreshed the flowers, when I’d looked down very briefly at Grandma’s tombstone and then up at the view, and heard Uncle Jin said, “Hi Ma, Betty’s home from New York and she’s here to see you,” and saw Grandpa standing on the empty plot next to Grandma’s with his hands crossed behind his back. It wasn’t until I heard Grandpa say almost lightly, “In a few years, I’ll be here,” and I had wanted to tell him to step back, to not let his shadow fall onto that space because it was bad luck didn’t he know — it wasn’t until we’d all gotten back into the Sienna and Uncle Jin started the car and said, “We’re going to get our haircut now,” that I realized the cemetery was only the beginning and that the day had just begun.

“Is that okay?” my uncle asked, looking at me in the rearview mirror.

I crossed my arms and looked out the window like a sullen teenager on a long road trip I didn’t want to be on.

“What am I going to do if it isn’t?” I said.

My uncle chuckled, wondering if he’d be better off not asking me to join at all. Grandpa said nothing.

“The restaurant is very good,” my uncle said, “I think you’ll like it. And the haircuts, they won’t take long.”

“They’re very fast,” Grandpa said, “fast and cheap.”

“And the grocery store is right around the corner,” Uncle Jin added, “I’ll just pop in and out. You can be back home no later than one or one-thirty PM.”

I doubted this, but I was already in the car, beginning to feel bad that my uncle felt bad. He had good if ill-communicated intentions. Also, no one would have guessed that I, family-oriented, old-people loving Betty, would be reluctant to visit my grandmother’s grave.

Two years ago in the fall, when Grandma was first hospitalized, I had driven the hour or so every other weeknight to her hospital in Monterey Park to spend the night with her. I had quit my job and was applying to graduate school, something I thought I could do in the quiet of a hospital wing filled with the dying elderly.

I brought books and magazine to read and my computer to work on, but found the visitor’s wing too busy and the reclining chair squeezed in between to the hospital bed and the wall too stiff. I spent little of the time speaking with Grandma, not because we didn’t get along – I loved her and she was grateful for my presence – but because she had Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease and could only breathe with the aid of a colossal Bi-Pap mask strapped to her mouth. Occasionally she would pull it aside and wheeze at me to bring her some water, which could only be administered via a small blue sponge through her broken, sore ridden lips or to call the nurse because she wanted to use the bathroom, but aside from that she would sigh heavily and wait. Aside from that, there was very little to say.

When it became apparent that she was not improving, that the steroids and antibiotics were doing more harm than good, that the doctor was avoiding all the family’s desperate inquiries not because he was busy making rounds but because he too, had very little to say about Grandma’s condition because it was obvious to him that she was dying; when the sores in her mouth were grower larger and blacker and grandma herself — before relentlessly optimistic, a fighter through and through – seemed to shrink smaller and become more tired, we continued to visit and chat, but inwardly we readied ourselves.

She took her last breath on November 3, 2012, surrounded by all her children and grandchildren. From the day she entered the hospital until the day she passed, the Bi-Pap machine still beeping at steady intervals, she was never once alone. All those hours and days and months we spent at the hospital, all the miles we drove and the fruits we prepared and photos we shared of my cousins’ newborn babies who were too young to be in the hospital sick room. All those nights we spent sleeping in the narrow visitor’s chair by her bed. We never once asked ourselves why we did it. She was alive. She knew that we were there. We knew that she knew, and that was why.

Then, grandpa made it his duty to visit her each day and for a year after she passed, he went to her grave almost daily, then weekly, and now, every two weeks. Once I thought, callously, he should find a hobby. But I remembered him saying over and over again, at the funeral and for many days that his other half had been with him for sixty-eight years. I paused to consider the magnitude of that emptiness, and could only consider it.

I think about my grandpas and how different they were. My father’s father, Grandpa Ho, never went to hospitals unless he was the one who was sick, and never went to funerals — not his friends’, not his wives’. Had one of his elderly daughters passed away before he did, he would not have gone to hers either.

“Why go,” he would say, “It’s for the sick and the dead. I am neither.”

And I think about my Grandpa Leu, my mother’s father, who dutifully shows up at funerals of both friends and acquaintances and who, despite being a frugal man who had no time for fresh flowers when his wife was alive, continues to go weekly to his wife’s grave with ten dollar bouquets from Trader Joe’s, to look at her smiling portrait lasered into the granite and stand on the empty plot next to her, mentally preparing for that certain time.

Grandpa Ho lived until he was one hundred. He died with very little wrong with him except an old heart. His unwillingness to put himself in places and situations that made him feel bad was a particular type of selfishness, but he had been generous in his own way. On us — healthy, happy and alive — he spent time and money (thought a traditionalist, he gave the boys more). When he wanted something from us – a lunch or dinner date, a group of people to travel with – he asked. Mostly though, he looked ahead. Went to work. Kept busy. Made plans. Traveled. Spent time with his family. When a spouse died, he remarried. He was like a sturdy old stone and we, the river, flowed around his wishes.

My Grandpa Leu cannot sit or stand or walk more than a few steps without wincing. He has pains in his legs, in his back, pains surgery can’t fix. He still walks to the park every morning, but lately he sits more than he walks. He asks very little of his kids and even less of his grandkids because he doesn’t want to inconvenience them. He thinks a lot about the past. About Grandma and the sixty-eight years they spent together. He doesn’t make plans. My aunts, my parents, my cousins – we make plans for him and he goes along, grumbling, giving us the occasional smile and story until he realizes he’s tired and he’d rather be at home watching TV, unless of course those plans are to go to the cemetery.

Neither man is right or wrong, neither way of living is good or bad. They are just two men, two ways. But I am beginning to understand — or perhaps I’ve always known — which way I prefer and why.

But I went along with Uncle Jin and Grandpa that morning. I quietly said hello to Grandma, took in the view. I ate the fried fish, the fragrant chicken. I drank the clear soup. I took photos of my grandfather getting his haircut and laughed when, sitting behind him in the car on the road home, found long hairs on the back of his neck the barber had missed.

“It’s too dim in there,” my grandfather had murmured, rubbing the back of his neck, “And it was five dollars. What can I expect?”

I said very little the whole time, because the whole time, I was afraid of sounding selfish, or unfilial and still I am afraid. Because I have set up the expectation that I am anything but. I volunteered to pass those nights at the hospital with my grandmother and when she passed away and before I left for school in New York, volunteered to cook and eat lunch with my grandpa three times a week. I volunteered to drive him to the bank, to vacuum his floors, to change his sheets and get items for the house. I did those things even though he never asked because he never would ask. I did those things because my grandpa was well and alive and he could appreciate those things; he appreciated my company and I appreciated being seen as filial. But to go to the cemetery with my grandpa and my uncle, to watch both men be sad when sadness could, without the prompting of a gravestone follow you anywhere. I did not see the point. The whole time I wished I was somewhere else and the whole time I vowed never to be caught in one of these long days again.

The traffic back was bad, and I wondered how Grandpa’s waist was doing but pitied more my last Friday morning in California. By the time Uncle Jin pulled into Grandpa’s driveway, it was nearly 2PM. I still had another half hour drive back home.

“Thanks for coming with us,” Uncle Jin said, “It’s always nice spending time with you. And we appreciate your spending time with us old folks.”

Grandpa nodded, easing himself out of the car.

“I’ll nap now,” he said, sensing my impatience to go, “You don’t have to come in.”

I nodded, thinking for a minute as my uncle truly did: that I had done a great charitable thing and given them my morning. I thanked my uncle for lunch, just lunch.

“Go, go,” Grandpa said.

And I did. I went home and swam and read travel magazines. I lazed about in my bed. On Saturday morning I played golf with my mother and walked around my big house. I hung out with my friends. In the evening, I helped my mother make dinner. I did all the things I wanted to do and thought about the things I had not wanted to do, but did anyway. I thought too, about thanking my uncle for inviting me on their long morning, a morning I’m unlikely to ever participate in again. But it would mean I was admitting to acting petulant and rude. Immature and selfish. So I said nothing.