Ace Visted His Great Grandpa

We woke up today with nowhere to go.

Gee, it's a Saturday and for the first time in a long while, we have no plans on a saturday afternoon! :)

I contemplated going swimming but the sky didnt look co-operative.

"Why don't we visit your grandfather? You kept saying that you want to visit him with Ace mah.."

And so it was decided that Ace will visit MY grandfather.

My grandfather (paternal side) passed away when I was in university. We were rather close to each other.

Yeye (as I called him) was fruit seller. Before that, he ran a provision shop. Yeye is the one who taught me how to count in Chinese, English, Malay, Tamil, Japanese... he is also the one who taught me how to do magic tricks with cards, how to play the game of 'fishing' using cards.

My favourite memory of him is him seated by the table.. chair facing the TV... and he is topless.. only wearing a pants tat my grandma made for him.. it is the blue striped pants you see all old men wear..

Yeye did not die of old age. Yeye died because he contracted cancer. It was rather swift. He suddenly could not ingest food and stayed in hospital for a while. And then he lost more and more weight.

My family was the only one that visited him EVERYDAY. Me and sis even went over to his house to stay with him and grandma.

On the day that he died, we were woken up in the middle of the night by a phonecall. They said that yeye was in a very bad state and that he probably is dying soon. We all rushed down at 3am in the morning but by 6am, yeye was ok and so I went to school because I couldnt afford to miss too many tutorials or i would be banned from exam.

After my Jap tutorial, i was rushing home when I recieved a page from my grandma's place. (we still used pagers then). I was on a bus and I didnt have a phone. On hindsight, i decided to rush to grandma's house. When i finally reached grandma's house... yeye was already dead... It was my ONLY regret in life that I was not at his bedside when he died...

I cried and cried and cried..

It has been many years though since he passed away.. and many years since i visited him. I was working.. and then i got married and pregnant.. and then I delivered and i felt that I should go visit him and let him know that he has a grandson..

So we travelled to AMK to have lunch at blk 128 first and then made our way to Brighthill... As i havent been there for a long time.. it took us a long time to even find a door into the pagoda where they put the urns..

The side doors were closed and we had to go through the crematerium... there was someone being creamated there. Strangely n luckily, Ace slept throughout the time we were looking for an entrance and only woke up when we were inside the pagoda..

I couldn't find M2-0393 despite walking up and down.. max was carrying Ace n was sweating badly. I then called my dad n realised tat he just reached home from visiting Yeye cos it was yeye's birthday!

Among his so many children n grandchildren, dad was the only one who visited him everyyear on his death anniversary, on qingming, on his birthday.

After walking through a maze, we finally found yeye.

It has been so many years. I thought I would be calm, cool and collected. Yet when I saw his face on the urn, the grief suddely became very fresh.. i couldn't help it but cried... it seemed as if he had only passed away yesterday...

I asked yeye if he was doing ok... then told him that i was married and this is my son. Ace just stared at the urn.. and i just cried.. max asked Ace to sayang mummy...

Well, I am buddhist and believe in recarnation.. i wonder where yeye is now? i wonder if he will have a chance to meet ace some day...