Wednesday February 18, 2009

Fanny’s story

By J.M. WONG

MY MOTHER passed away at the age of 81. The last four years of her life, she was bound to her wheelchair.

The stroke which felled her left the right side of her hitherto robust frame paralysed. Whilst she was still able to feed herself and brush her teeth, everything else had to be done for her.

An independent person all her life, she could have been a difficult patient as she struggled to come to terms with her new dependency. Thus her patient acceptance was remarkable. She never once indicated that she pitied herself. Nor did she comment on my housekeeping and culinary efforts, which most surely fell short of her own high standards of competency.

“Spit and span”, she was wont to say, her particular choice of a word for “spick”. It reminded me of a regiment, and I considered it quite an appropriate substitute. Until she was incapacitated, she kept our home “spitting” clean.

The stroke triggered off some alchemy which transmuted my no-nonsense and ever practical mother into the spontaneous and fun-loving person she eventually became.

Overnight, she was once again “Fanny,” the name the convent nuns used to call her. And thus, Fanny retorted when some asked her age: “Why should I tell you? I’m not going to marry you!”

Her cheeky grin was her sign that it was a huge joke to be enjoyed by all.

So, too, she would charmingly badger me: “Someone ought to write my story.”

“And who would want to read it?” I countered, surprised by her artlessness.

Now, 15 years later, I’m doing it!

Some things one learns in hindsight. In her sickness, as in her health, Mother didn’t complain. She accepted both the constraints of her illness, as well as the buffetings thrown into her path in life.

Orphaned at 12 years, she, together with three of her sisters, were shepherded into an orphanage run by the convent nuns. She stayed there until the day of her marriage.

Throughout her life, she remembered and verbalised her appreciation of the nuns who gave shelter and sustenance to her and her siblings. I’ve come to realise that besides the protection and safe haven they gave to orphan girls in vulnerable times, they taught them how to live upright lives.

My mother imbibed from them their sense of charity, mission, and determination to be and do good, no matter the outcome.

This determination became her strength when tragedy again struck in her life. She was widowed soon after the birth of her second child, a son. My mother was left to single-handedly tend for herself and her two young children: I was five then, and my brother, just three months old.

Yet, she managed to soldier on, and saw to it that along with our spartan living, we had an education.

“Waste not, want not,” was another of her sayings. And so, we lived through thrift and discipline. Leadership by example was how she taught us. Mother was hardest on herself.

No evidence of her hard life, however, showed in her demeanour nor in her conversations, nor in her interactions with others.

“People think I’m fairly well-off,” she would say with a smile. I’m inclined to believe it was also her own private joke. She said it without any trace of vanity.

She had come to realise in her fairly long life that one can manage, just so, without wealth and she was content with whatever she had.

In her sickness, Fanny remembered the songs of yesteryear. It was then I discovered her two song books, written in perfect cursive handwriting. Oftentimes I sang to her.

“You’re improving,” she would say with her cheeky smile.

The song she loved most and returned to again and again was, Silver Threads among the Gold. This was to be her swan song. She hummed it on the evening of her last day on earth, and passed on to eternity on Valentine’s Day – Feb 14, 1993.

In my mother’s metamorphosis into the fun-loving and at times outrageous Fanny, I see two aspects of a life I used to read about – doing and being.

For the greater part of her years, she was “doing” – caring for our maternal needs. After the stroke, she “became.” She engaged those around her with her wit and romanticism, and sensitised us to invisible realities.

I continue to be amazed at the evolution of the person who is also my mum, all through her life, in sickness, pain, sorrow, and suffering, to finally become pure, joyous spirit.

Thank you, Mum, for everything.