My Mother's Mouth

I woke up with a start in the middle of the night and couldn’t go back to sleep. My tossing and turning must have woken Papa Bkworm from his slumber because he woke up long enough to ask me if everything was ok before he fell back into deep sleep again.

In the silence of the night, aside from the soft whirring of the fan at the foot of the bed, I could hear my own breathing. I close my eyes tightly, hoping to drift back into sleep but my thoughts floated to the time when my mother was lying motionless on the hospital bed in the middle of the family home, waiting to die. It’s such a cruel description but essentially, that was what it was.

A part of me knew where these thoughts were heading and I tried to steer myself away from them, yet the other part of me continued to re-live my mother’s final days on earth. I can still hear her voice in my head. She used to call me, Ah Wai (yes, that is my Chinese name), a deep and low voice, gentle but firm. I could hear that same voice asking me how the work day had been. And that same voice that turned angry when I didn’t accede to her wishes which I had thought, at that point of time, to be unreasonable on her part. That voice.

And then, the shape of her mouth when she laughed, when she spoke, when she called my name. Her mouth had the shape of a ‘ling kok’ (water caltrops), curved slightly upward at the ends. It reminded me of Fung Bo Bo’s mouth. Towards the end of her days, that beautiful mouth became a perpetual shape of an ‘O’. Her lips were dry and cracked, no matter how often we dabbed it with soft, wet cotton wool. She couldn’t close her mouth completely, yet out of that opened mouth, there came no sound. As silent as the eyes that kept looking up at us, her children and grandchildren who were tortured by the sight of her suffering, wanting to lift her out of her intense suffering, yet unable to. The mouth that could no longer call my name or call out to those who loved her so much and who would give anything to have her well and smiling again.

The tears welled up immediately and I cried all over again into my pillow.