Ā mā
Amy Hill
By Zennie Trieu, New York, New York, U.S.
My maternal grandmother grew up wealthy and happy in China, until the Communists took almost everything away from her family. Her father passed away when she was eight, but she escaped to Vietnam and persisted on. There, she met my grandfather; together, they pursued business, had six beautiful children, and fought for freedom in big and small ways: she transported, by bike, letters between the resistance efforts, and he would take down the picture of Ho Chi Minh that the government mandated be hung up in the house—instead, putting up a photograph of himself, arguing that he was far more handsome.
My grandma immigrated to America in the nineties. She and my grandpa made their living in a restaurant, ensuring that my mother, aunts, and uncles would receive the educations that they wanted and deserved. My grandparents have traveled the world far and wide, from Alaskan cruises to Australian getaways. Some family members moved to California; others came of age in Europe. We like to hold reunions in Hawaii.
No matter the distance, all of us would agree that my grandma cooked the best damn salmon—skin on. She wanted everyone to have the same hearty appetite as my grandpa, a man who, even when eventually diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer, would dress to the nines just for a leisurely stroll around suburbia—button shirt tucked in, vest, newsboy cap, vintage walking cane, and trousers belted slightly above the navel, à la Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday.
One time, on the bus ride home from school, I looked out the window and saw an adorable older couple taking a walk and holding hands. I pointed them out to my friend next to me; she replied, “Aren’t those your grandparents?”
I took a closer look; she was right.
Ā mā stayed home with me on Christmas Eve 2013 as everyone else was in the ER with my grandpa. Sitting on her bedroom floor, she showed me photo albums, at first providing descriptions of where and when each picture was taken, then eventually letting me flip the pages at my own pace. I trembled as tears distorted everything into a blurb. My grandma simply sat there with me, was not intimidated to look me in the eye, to go there with me as we got through the night with one another.
She was the only person in my family who never told me to stop once the waterworks began, who would never immediately rush to get a box of tissues and tell me to wash my face, to stop crying. She accepted me as a grown woman with big, bold feelings, but also loved me like I was still that toddler putting Blue’s Clues stickers all over my body.
My grandfather passed away three months later at home, surrounded by the family. Right before he left us, he looked at my grandma, smiled like he was the luckiest man alive, and just… went.
On Passover 2020, Ā mā joined him. It was sudden.
Days later, we were, fortunately, allowed to hold a modest, safe, and health-consciously responsible funeral. When I went up to kneel before her to say my goodbye, I felt a strange sense of steadiness. All I could think, feel, and understand in that moment was: “This is okay.”
Ā mā had reunited with her soulmate in heavenly homecoming.
In linear, worldly, human-constructed time, they had been together for exactly half a century. In the big picture that is ethereal eternity, as God would see the history of the universe, this is a mere drop in the ocean.
It just… is.