Grandpa

Grandpa passed away last week.

I won't be able to attend the funeral in LA, and so I'm preparing a note for one of my sisters to read at the memorial service. And so I've been thinking about his life - the wars he lived through, his days as a general, fighting through bleak, cold winters (and the many impatient hours I spent with him half-listening to his stories); his arrival to the States, his years working humbly as a custodian, though he had been a headmaster in Hong Kong. He had a temper - I saw that a little bit, but mostly heard about it from my father and my aunts and uncles. He made mistakes as a husband and as a father, but he also quietly bore with much.

He loved to write. When we were younger, we would write letters to him and receive responses in his trembling, austere script.  He did calligraphy as well. They were never as good as those of my maternal grandpa's, but they were far better than anything we could hope to aspire to.  When I was taking photography classes in college, I liked to take pictures of him writing. He would scribble around the edges of newspaper cuttings or copy out Scripture on blank sheets of paper with his long, slender fingers grasping the pen expertly.  Then he would slowly push himself up from the seat and shuffle off to get something else.

Yet I find it hard to remember what it was like when he was well, when he was living life a bit more. The strongest memory I have now is just him in the last year - bony and weak, sleeping incessantly, with only brief moments of lucidity. He ate very little. He often couldn't make his way to the bathroom or ask for help in time.

I didn't like to see him like that. He was reaching his end, and not, as I saw, in the noble way suited to how much he had gone through and who he had been. Old age had gradually stripped him of his body, his mind, and his dignity.

But Jesus has the last word.

My memory paints Grandpa as a frail shell of a body losing all functions, but God sees him as he is now - free, whole, beholding Jesus face to face.

'The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.' 1 Corinthians 15:56-57

In Chinese culture, if a person dies after reaching the age of 80, the funeral will be a happy one, because he/she has lived a long life. Grandpa was 105.

We are happy today not because of his many years on earth, but because he is spending eternity with the Lord. One day I will see Grandpa again, and know what Paul meant when he wrote: 'what is mortal is swallowed up by life.'