Pierced Years
I’ve always found it uncomfortable attending family weddings and reunion dinners as an officially single person but family funerals are worse. Plus I never thought I would feel nostalgic for the days when people called me ‘Sir’ by mistake. Here, in this very cold room at my mother’s funeral wake, the staff of the Singapore Casket Company are calling me ‘Aunty’.
My Mum died alone. I know I should feel more upset than I do but I think it hasn’t sunk in yet. I didn’t realize people die so fast.
The problem is, we don’t schedule dying the way we schedule other family activities. When my mother died two nights ago, my brother was away on a business trip and I had gone to Phuket for a weekend to get over a break up; what’s known in the community as the annual break-up. The one that begins with, ‘Don’t you care about anything?’
, ‘Why do you have to be so intense about everything?’
Most inter-generational Singapore lesbian couples will probably know what I mean’of course you don’t have to have a younger partner to have problems, but if you do, they tend to be more ‘interesting’ and if you really want trouble, get involved with a young activist. (One thing I find amazing now is how breaking up takes so much longer and consumes so much more effort and energy than dying.) Pinky says people her age are the only ones doing anything because those my age don’t dare and those younger than her don’t care.
For the record I would like to point out it’s not that I didn’t dare join Pinky in that ‘getting the Singapore flag painted on gay bare body parts project (organised by her hero Alex Au’’Proud parts of a proud Nation’) it’s just that other things are important too, like not getting fired so you can earn a living and pay the mortgage’ also for the record I realize I’m starting to sound like my mother’s my late mother. Funny. I thought I never listened to my mother. Like she never listened to me. And apparently didn’t look at me.
My mother left me all her earrings; at least two dozen pairs, including the ones my grandmother left her. Gold studs, pearl studs, rubies, jade tear drops and a pair of diamonds set in white gold’all beautifully designed ladylike’pierced’ear lobes. I don’t have pierced ears. I don’t wear ladylike jewelry; I thought after forty-five years my mum would have noticed that. That’s why I was surprised I got the earrings. I wasn’t the only one.