Mickey Lai
Director
I lost my grandmother in December 2021, when I just returned from overseas and was undergoing a 7-day hotel quarantine. At an 8-mins drive and 3.6kms, the hotel was close to the hospital. So close yet so far. It didn’t make any sense to me why I wasn’t able to meet her to say one final goodbye. After she passed, I revisited the footages that were shot during last year’s lockdown in Malaysia. Most days, I was by her side and observing her daily routines. The longer I lingered, the more I felt she was at the brink of leaving. The pandemic anxiously adds to this uncertainty. With that, I picked up my phone and camera daily to film her. I don’t want to forget anything about my grandmother - her face, voice, and that distinct sound as she scratches her skin. Conversations with my dementia-ridden grandmother revolved around simple topics such as her age, her past jobs and her belief that the veins in her hands are worms living under her skin. She would scratch her hands day and night, trying to remove it. I was fascinated by this. 3 months after her passing, my family and I travelled back to our hometown, my grandmother’s previous home, in hopes of weaving reminiscences of our past. We were shocked to discover the wooden house’s predicament - rotten, filled with bat excrement, dusty and very unpleasant. I felt my father’s despair, witnessing the place he grew up in is now in shambles. Standing still at a house corner and staring at the space, my grandmother’s words about the worms struck me. Like her body, the house is ageing. Like her belief that worms are eating her slowly, the wooden house is rotting with time. Everything in this world, be it human beings or non-living objects, we all couldn’t escape change. Now that I had completed this grieving journal and we are in an endemic phase, I have learnt that the most precious things in life are unseen. They have turned into memories and are imprinted in our minds. I was thankful for my circumstances. It’s in the lockdown that I was able to spend my grandmother’s final three months by her side, to learn about the art of waiting and embracing death.