Laughing and crying

We laughed and joked in the morning as we had breakfast.  Some morbid joke about death, a play on words in Taiwanese which both mum and I found so amusing for some reason.

She was talking about whom I should call after she "returns". "To return" being a euphemism for dying, for passing. She was telling me about her colleagues at work and arrangements she's made with regards to her pension plan.

"Return? Where are you going to return to?" I asked cheekily.

"To become a deity! To become a finance officer up there!" At her last post, one she held for many years before retirement, she was in charge of finances and accounts at the branch of the revenue bureau she was working at.

Somehow that was very amusing, and it was beautiful to see mum laugh, to hear her laugh out loud. However brief that lightness felt, it was felt and distracted from all else.

In the face of death, you must be able to make fun of it, to poke and prod at it. How can you fully realise life without joking about death? Humour is a way to deal with and accept the unchangeable, the unacceptable. And I'm glad we still have the ability, though rare, to laugh out loud.

Fast forward an hour, and that laughter was long gone. I could see a tear in the corner of mum's. Was she tearing because of the pain, the excruciating pain that had come back as the painkillers wore off? Or was she crying because I insisted on accompanying her to the hospital? She kept on telling me to leave, leave the chemotherapy ward. "Go! Go, I don't want you hanging around here, the air is stale here and there are many sick people here..." but she is there, and has no choice but to be there.

I did as I was told, and left. I looked back though, looked back and saw mum sitting in the armchair in her personal "pod" as the nurse kept busy preparing the doses of drugs to be injected intravenously.

 The last image before I left was mum with her eyes closed tightly. Her forehead was crumpled in grief, her face contorted in pain... Immense, indescribable,  immeasurable pain.

Again, the sense of helplessness and deep deep compassion overwhelmed me and caused me to cry as I quickly stepped outside.

But like the laughter and lightness that disappeared so quickly, so will my pain... Everything will pass...

 Everything will fade away and pass.