After Merlene’s death, she tried to tell herself that detachment was the answer that if she could just hold herself apart, she could keep doing this work. But private nursing is not like ward nursing.
In a ward, you have many patients, you move from bed to bed, you are part of a team.
At home, it is just you and one patient, every night. Inevitably, a bond forms. You share their silences, their stories, their fears. She thought she could separate herself, keep a little distance. But she learned quickly that it’s almost impossible.
When you sit at someone’s bedside through the night, watch them breathe, laugh with them about old mistakes, sing their favourite songs, hold their hand when the pain comes detachment slips away. You can’t help but grow close. You’re just being human.
And when they die, it is not just the patient who leaves. A part of you goes with them. She came to the realisation that if she wanted to save herself, if she wanted to go on being a nurse at all she had to do something.
Private nursing had taken her too far into people’s lives, too far into their dying, until she could no longer separate their pain from her own. If she didn’t step back, she knew she would be lost with them.
So she made the choice to leave. She signed on with a nursing agency, this time for floor duty at Mount Elizabeth Hospital. They posted her to the Intensive Care Unit. It was a different world from the quiet of private homes machines humming, monitors glowing, ventilators sighing in rhythm.
Doctors, nurses, and technicians moved in and out in a constant flow. Here, she was one among many, part of a team again. The structure and the pace gave her distance. It wasn’t that the ICU was free of death far from it but the work was shared, and the boundaries were clearer.
She could still care deeply, but she didn’t have to carry the whole weight alone. After Merlene’s death, she thought she had found some distance working in the ICU.
But then her mother died, and the walls she had built collapsed again.At home, it was mostly the four of them : Mom and Dad, her youngest brother, and her. The others were already married, settled in their own homes.
Many times she wanted to leave too, to run away, to climb a mountain and never come back. But she couldn’t. She told herself she stayed for Dad, that Mom needed her. Maybe she did. Maybe she didn’t. She would never really know. What she did know was that her mother’s mental condition was the chain that kept her there.Her mother drove her up the wall sometimes.
She thought she could show compassion, that she could be attentive and patient. She told herself, you’re a nurse, you should understand her better than anyone else. But did she?“ Of course you did,” her cousin told her one day. “From the way you talk about her, from how you react you know her better than your siblings. Couldn’t you see? She clung to you. When you weren’t around, she talked about you all the time. She felt insecure when you stayed too long at the hostel or the staff duty room. Why do you think she kept calling you at work?”
Her cousin’s words stayed with her. She had once read that the mother-daughter relationship is the most complicated of all. Conflict never really ends, it only shifts. And it was true: it was hard to write about her mother without emotion rising up.
Anger flared in her at times, but it never lasted. The moment she heard her mother’s voice again, she forgot what the anger had even been about. There are two kinds of grief. When someone you love suffers through a prolonged terminal illness, their death comes almost as a relief. She grieved, yes, but the grief was softened by the knowledge that their suffering had ended. It passed more quickly.
But when someone you love dies suddenly in a traffic accident, a heart attack grief takes on another form. First comes shock, then a long, grinding ache that never quite heals. It is filled with guilt and regret. She found herself circling back to the same thoughts: If only I had one more chance. If only I could say I’m sorry. If only I could ask for forgiveness for the words I said in anger, the words I never should have spoken… the ones I can never take back.
Grief is a master of disguises. It tricked her into believing she was fine. She thought she could cry, stop, laugh, and move on with the flow of things. She even grew impatient, angry at people who said the wrong words at the wrong time.
She thought she was in control. Until one night, she woke from a dream to the sound of her own voice wailing like a lost, frightened child.
Grief, she often thought, was like the rain. When it rained, you could protect yourself with an umbrella, or slip on a raincoat so you wouldn’t get wet. When the rain fell too hard, with thunder and lightning splitting the sky, you stayed indoors where it was safe and warm. Inside, you could keep dry. And when the storm passed, you could step outside again, breathing in the freshness.
The trees, the flowers, even the grass seemed to shine with new life. Rain is good, she would tell herself.But what happens when it rains all the time when the sky never clears, when the downpour stretches for days, for weeks? Then there is no sun, no moon, only grey. The air grows heavy, the walls close in.
She grew restless, longing to break free from the shelter that had become her prison. At that point, she no longer cared if she got wet or even if lightning struck. She wanted to run into the storm, to shout at the sky and demand that the rain stop. Life, she realised, was full of patterns. We cling to them to make sense of what happens around us.
Even when we try to change a pattern, we only create another one. After death, after loss, the old pattern is shattered. In its place, she tried to weave a new one different in design but painted with the same colours. But it never fit. No matter how she arranged it, she could not recreate what was gone.
The pattern would never be the same again. She still dreamed of her, even a year after her death. Sometimes her mother appeared with a faint smile, the kind that lit her face only briefly in life. But most nights she came looking sad, her eyes carrying some unspoken weight.
She never said much in those dreams. She would simply sit, watching quietly while her daughter moved about, busy with the endless tasks of work or routine.At times, she seemed to try her lips moved, as though forming words but no sound reached her daughter’s ears.
The silence was unbearable. She strained to listen, leaning in, desperate to catch a single word, a fragment of meaning. But nothing came. Perhaps that was the problem, she later thought. She had spent so much time questioning her mother, wanting answers, pressing for reasons, that she had never really listened.
Hadn’t she once read: I was hearing but did not hear I was seeing but did not see?
And then, one night, the dreams stopped. She longed for sleep, hoping her mother would return, but night after night her bed remained empty of those visitations. The silence stretched on. She missed her more in absence than she ever had in presence.
If she could not find her in dreams, then perhaps she could find her where she truly was in her final resting place, where her bones lay deep beneath the earth. It was not reason that compelled her, but a need, raw and insistent: the need to be near her mother once more, to feel her presence, even in the stillness of the grave.So she sought her mother.
She went to the cemetery, certain she would find her. She had been there many times before with her brothers and sisters. But this time she wanted to go alone she needed to be alone with her.Yet she could not find the grave. She moved round and round the rows of stone, the lot and block number written clearly in her hand.
She followed the instructions again and again, but nothing.It was a Friday afternoon, and the heat pressed down on her shoulders. The air shimmered. She was thirsty, tired, and there was no one around to ask. Alone in the cemetery, circling endlessly, she began to feel like an intruder. Perhaps she was an uninvited guest, she thought.
You cannot simply walk into someone’s house without announcing yourself to the owner.So she stepped back walk out and stood outside the gate of the cemetery, lifted her face, and called softly: “Mom… I’m here. I’ve missed you. Where are you?”
Her voice broke into a whisper, the cry of a frightened, lost child. And then something shifted. She felt it: an invisible hand, gentle, steady, closing around hers. Guiding her. She turned down the path she had already walked before, but this time it was different. And there it was the grave.
She realised it had been waiting for her all along, as her mother had always waited for her. The little plant she had placed there months ago stood as a living marker, green against the stone.As she sat in silence by memories flooded her mother laughing, scolding, working beside her.
But woven through those memories was the sting of guilt: the harsh words spoken in anger, the times she wanted to run away, the moments she failed to listen. For a long while she sat with it, heavy and unyielding.
Then, in her weariness, a gentler thought came: she had not been a bad child. She had only been a tired child, trying very hard. Perhaps her mother had known that all along.It struck her in that vulnerable moment tired from night duty, worn from resuscitations that had drained her body and spirit that forgiveness was not something given from outside, but something she had to grant herself.
Only then could her mother’s memory rest lightly upon her heart.
And in that silence, another memory surfaced: the police inspector’s words after her mother’s death. “Your mother told the ambulance nurse that the food was for her daughter who was on night duty. She said her daughter was very tired today when she came back from work. This food is her dinner she must be hungry.” She saw herself again that day at the brought in death room of the Emergency room, sitting on the floor beside the trolley where they place her mother's body, in tears hugging on to the package of food.
The words came back with unexpected force. Even at the very end, her mother’s thoughts had been of her. Not of quarrels, not of old wounds but of care, as simple and steady as the food she cooked.
The truth was there all along: love had never left. When she rose to leave, she did not look back. She knew she did not need the grave to remind her. She had built an altar for her mother in her heart. There, she would always live.
