Act I.

I was staring blankly at my screen, fixing this report, when a notification popped up. It was Mom—she said that Eyang’s condition had plunged. I packed for three days and drove to Bogor in a heartbeat. It was the evening a day before Bapak’s death anniversary and I remember having a bad feeling about it. Seeing the road with all the tears in my eyes was difficult—on loudspeaker, my best friend told me to let it all out.

Little did I know, it was barely the beginning of a slow and painful journey called ‘having to watch your loved one lose herself to a chronic disease’.

The first two weeks were pure chaos. We found out that Eyang’s level of toxin shot through the roof because her kidney practically stopped working. My brain was kind enough to spare me from recollecting every little upsetting details, but memories of the ambulance rides (where Eyang won’t let go of my hand), the crowded emergency wards (a mother gave birth that night), and the high care unit room (with their aircons on full blast) remain.

I remember having to make a lot of medical decisions that week—small ones at first (like putting a nasogastric tube to feed her), but peaked at whether they should place a central vena cathether required for hemodialysis treatment, with a possible risk of complication.

The hardest part about trying to do right by her, is defining what right means in the first place: keeping her alive longer, making sure she’s comfortable, trying to decipher what she would want when she was literally too weak to speak.

I remember the shock that went through my spine, imagining the possibility of losing Eyang. I definitely wasn’t ready back then—not after losing Bapak a year before, and being left by Wikan just a few months after that. I remember fearing the pain of losing, perhaps more than losing itself.

I also remember not feeling like a granddaughter but a parent, not only to Eyang but to her son and daughter, who probably were just as worried but didn’t share my overthinking brain. I remember crying a lot, feeling like there’s a new weight on my shoulders I never meant to carry.

In between, I remember feeling grateful for having Pap, Kakak, and friends who got my back through it all.

Act II.

The storm subsided a bit when Eyang started regaining consciousness and explicitly asked to go home, leaving no room for her caretakers to second-guess (how thoughtful of her). At home, she asked us to gather around her bed, thanked and apologized, before going on parting some wisdom (“Jadilah orang berguna untuk sesama. Kalau cari pasangan, jangan cari yang ganteng aja tapi yang kaya juga,”—HAHAHA sempet-sempetnya, Eyang).

That maghrib, the whole family prayed together, and I led one thanking God for letting Eyang into our lives, making us into the people we are today, touching our hearts in her own special ways.

In the next few days, a stream of extended family members visited, wishing her well. It was quite special to witness and get reminded of how she lived a full life, how much she was loved by others. By the end of the week, she said something like, “Kayaknya di keluarga lain nggak ada yang sesayang ini deh (sama Eyangnya)…” which warmed all of our hearts.

It felt like (for lack of better words) a new normal for a bit, until one by one, the family members were hit by omicron. The virus got me too, eventually, which sent me home for a few days. But more worryingly, Eyang tested positive as well. I naturally panicked when we first found this out, thinking that this was it. It thankfully wasn’t, but that next few weeks was a mess regardless—she was coughing a lot, could barely sleep, all the while we still had to take her to the hospital twice a week for 4 hours of hemodyalisis. It might not be as intense of a mess, but definitely bigger in size.

I quietly sensed that everyone was slowly losing themselves in taking care of Eyang.

Routines permanently changed, work felt profoundly arbitrary and minute. All the stress, worries, and secondhand pain also brought out the worst in us. There’s at least a couple times when I snapped, yelled at another family member across the hospital hall or the family room, not able to hold it together. I didn’t feel like myself and I hated it.

It also came with a mountain of guilt when I feel like I wasn’t a good enough granddaughter. Every time I had to leave her for work, an offline meeting, or even to take a break and spend some time for myself, it felt like I was doing a crime. It gave me a lot of anxieties and affected my sleep.

(It just so happened that I did a terrible blunder on Twitter which got blown out of proportion during this period, which made things a thousand times worse.)

Act III.

Before I spiraled back into the dark hole where I lived for a good chunk of time last year, I started seeing a therapist again. My goal was to better understand what’s going on in my mind—making peace with the voices in my head definitely wouldn’t hurt—and primarily trying to better understand what it is that I actually need and want.

I had quite a few breakthroughs in those sessions (in case someone needed to hear this as well):

First, I learned that I kept feeling guilty because nobody ever told me that I’ve done enough. Growing up, Mom was the main breadwinner in the family (I now overtook that role), and I might have inadvertently picked up hidden social cues in terms of what ‘enough’ looks like for a woman. Whenever Mom was home in the weekends, she would do the extra miles of taking care of the family, all that after working nonstop during the weekdays.

My therapist wondered if my dad ever told her she’s done enough. Have I perhaps copied her guilt, and general lack of self compassion?

Second, I need to understand that it’s okay for me to take a different role in the family. Think of the family is a soccer team, or maybe a company, my therapist said. Someone has to play offense, others on defense, and one of us definitely has to be the goal keeper. In a company, the CEO, staff, and janitors do different things, but it doesn’t mean that any of them is better than the others. They simply cover for one another. In my family, I might not be able to stay with Eyang 24/7 (what I primarily feel guilty about), but quitting my job to do that wouldn’t be how I could best help her either—in my own ways, providing for my family might just be exactly how I could be the most useful.

On a less relevant note, my therapist told me that I needed to decide the kind of life (and partner when it comes to it) that I want and deserve. I might have been struggling with intimacy, with letting people into my life, and on the flip side, where I mindlessly let anyone in. After the divorce, and now Eyang, there is a huge risk that without properly processing the trauma, I could make stupid decisions that might end up actually hurting me.

Just like in picking mangoes from a fruit stall, she said, I shall set some criteria that will guide me in better understanding the mangoes that are good for me, filtering the ‘bad mangoes’ out, or at least having better awareness when I had to make a compromise across tradeoffs. It was also supposed to be a way to capture the lessons learned from what things didn’t work with Wikan. It is still not very clear how this would help me in helping Eyang—maybe rather indirectly—but took a good hour to sit down and come up with this wishlist and it eased my mind a little.

It has only been two months since that initial text from Mom, but it felt like a long, winding year already.

All in all, I am quite grateful to have the support system without whom I would have easily cracked under all the pressure. Despite the major turbulences, in general I feel quite centered, and finally well-calibrated to take on whatever possible scenarios moving forward.

Today, Eyang’s condition is stable, except that parts of her brain that control memories and motor were recently affected. The family has agreed that for us the priority is to keep Eyang as faraway from pain as possible, to keep her comfortable, and to give her what she wants—and more importantly: to always make her feel loved.

Just a few hours ago I found out that she might have lost her memories of me (didn’t respond to “Ini Nenk Dhyta,”), but to my surprise I felt okay about it. I’d like to think it stems from all the work I’ve put to find my center in accepting the universe’s curve balls—although there’s a slight chance that I’m simply in denial. Whichever one it is, I surely hope that what my dear friend said holds true:

“Rest assured that her memories of you and how much pride and love she has derived from your being there for her has already been permanently etched in the aeons.”

Mohon doanya yang terbaik untuk Eyang <3

It is such a peculiar thing, being sick.

As a stereotypical first daughter, I have been trained my whole life to be independent, strive for self-sufficiency, and never need someone else’s help. Didn’t need it to change the light bulb, to fix a frame on the wall, or to move heavy furnitures from one corner of the room to another. I would always figure something out.

Yet as soon as a slight fever or a bad case of headache makes an appearance, I suddenly turn into this needy, selfish, crybaby monster who feels entitled to someone’s care. I suddenly forgot how to boil the water and make tea, how to feed myself—no memory at all on how to even move around.

Now you might think it’s perfectly acceptable to need a hand when your body isn’t well, but lately, I realize that what I’m experiencing is a little bit more intense, might be slightly problematic, and stems from how my parents treated me when I got sick as a child.

TL;DR: They spoil me. Big time.

My parents would double their attention to me if I get sick. My earliest memories include getting the long-awaited Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets book simply because I got a fever (they weren’t gonna because it was so expensive). They would get me a KFC chicken soup (which was a special treat back then), spoonfeed me, tuck me in, and sweet-talk me into taking my medicine. They would check on my temp every other hour.

At some point, my then-adult self couldn’t take anything less.

If someone told me they loved me but wouldn’t show up when I got sick, my childhood experience would interpret that as—well—not love. No matter how friendly the sickness is: a benign migraine or food poisoning, I would need their attention right there and then.

If someone told me they loved me but wouldn’t show up when I got sick, they probably lied. I would feel sad, with the sadness coming more strongly out of not having them around and less about actually being sick.

It is only recently that I realize that not everyone was treated by their parents the same way mine did when they got sick. It turns out, for some people, being sick might not be such a big deal.

In hindsight, some of my major fights with my ex-husband were around him not being there (enough) for me when I was sick. I didn’t understand it then, but recently I came to the realization that he probably had a different experience of being sick as a child, and that’s why he didn’t interpret it as a ‘core love language’ as it has been for me.

But I am learning and unlearning. I now respect boundaries in friendships and relationships, which sometimes include not getting upset when others may or may not have time for me when I am down with a fever. I think that should count as progress on my end.

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As an adult, today I understand that a lot of our entitlement and emotional baggage haunt us from the past. Our memories shape our core values and expectations of how other people should treat us. It would determine whether we think we deserve love and how we would regard love.

What we now call ‘love language’ might just be how our parents express their love to us as a child.

My primary love language is ‘act of service’ and it’s probably linked to how my dad drops and picks me up from school every day, how my mom makes me breakfast whenever she’s home (she has a full-time job), and how Eyang always prepares everything for me and for my school. They’re not the hugging type—with some exceptions, ‘physical touch’ sometimes feels unnatural to me—we didn’t have that much spare money to do something together and have ‘quality time’ or ‘give gifts’. Instead of giving ‘words of affirmation’, my dad wholeheartedly believes that teasing her daughter will keep her humble her whole life (I actually don’t mind this).

So all my training on being independent goes out the window when someone shows up and offers me that ‘service’: like if you pick or drop me off at a place, or help me with a random, completely minuscule errand at home, I would probably interpret that as love.

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Recently a Swedish language expert (?) came up with a list of words that describe the different shades of feelings that the English language cannot provide words for. One day a friend forwarded a World Economic Forum post on it on Instagram.

And with that, I would like to contribute one new adverb:

Sonely. (adv.) the feeling of wishing someone you love is around to take care of you when you’re sick.

“(Your moon) is in your seventh house, meaning you find security and safety through close relationships and long-term partnerships.”

[What my Co-Star app told me one October evening.]

I’m not particularly into astrology, but that line hit me hard for the sheer truth of it. I do find security and safety through having a constant; through knowing that I have someone who will always be there to catch me when I fall. This is why, when the marriage ended, above anything else, I felt insecure and unsafe. Suddenly the world worked differently—I often found myself second-guessing whom I can call for help from when I’m in need, or what possible motivations a person has when they indeed showed up.

The structure upon which my realities were built crumbled. I wasn’t sure how to function.

It suddenly dawned on me how everything I have achieved in the past five years was only possible because I knew I had my then-husband to come home to. I could reach up up up to the stars because he grounded me in my roots, making sure I wouldn’t plunge unannounced. Therefore when he left, I was untethered—I was afloat, roaming a weird, unfamiliar space of uncertainties.

A friend reminded me that it wasn’t true; that I would be fine and have an equally full life if I could just take the time to find my own center again—this time from within. What he said didn’t change the fact that I did have a pretty solid case of dependency going on. And I worry that I might repeat this pattern on someone else sooner or later—and that I would only get hurt again as they leave me (and I know for a fact that they will, one way or another).

This is why when someone did make an appearance, it scared the shit out of me. I was anxious a lot.

My mind would take me to the extreme ends like a non-stop pendulum: one day I’d be convinced that I didn’t want anyone to enter my newly-formed personal bubble—why bother re-participating in a construct so full of compromise where you’d probably lose yourself again? But then came those bits of magical moments and conversations that made it difficult for me not to want more, and a secret corner in my mind longing to reach a new equilibrium where I could finally feel safe and secure again.

I thought the separation would have sharpened my intuition but no, I’m back to my overthinking, overanalyzing self. If anything, there are more ‘shoulds’ to follow this time around; they often contradict one another—at times it would feel like my brain simply can’t follow.

For example, one ‘should’ would tell me to take my time to heal, prescribing me to sit around a bit more with the loneliness. Instead of running away to the comfort of someone else’s arms, I was supposed to sit down with my sadness and embrace the pain. It’s the only way forward.

And yet another ‘should’ believes that we were supposed to lean in and be honest to the universe about what we want (although they don’t always mean what I need). So perhaps I ‘should’ trust my instinct a little more, and not be afraid of getting hurt because I will be either way.

Not to mention that this person is far from simple. He comes with his own sets of layers of complexities for me to learn and understand, his own history of past traumas, convictions, philosophies of life that dictates their decisions in ways that sometimes clash with what I want (although first I need to figure what I want, which hasn’t been the case).

In Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown (it’s a book that literally maps out the different range and depth of human emotions, I highly recommend it), there’s a chapter about ‘places we go to when things are uncertain’, where she lists the language to call some of these emotions—like overwhelmed and anxious. Overwhelmed and anxious very well describe how I’ve been.

For someone who values open-mindedness, I seem to have quite a high need for closure (NFC) when it comes to ‘partnerships and relationships’ (blame my moon in libra lol). At the end of the day, I function better when clarity of definitions exists, as they would set boundaries and expectations, including when they mean I couldn’t have any.

But as it turns out, there are times when uncertainties just have to be its own equilibrium for a while—for one reason or another. These are the times I need to teach myself to enjoy being a loose hot air balloon, letting the wind (?) take me where I need to be. It makes me profoundly uncomfortable, but maybe learning about this different state of being is part of the journey.

In the spirit of lowering one’s NFC: It’s okay that I don’t quite know.

Stay healthy everyone.