My mum was born in Ipoh, Malaysia, to a large family. She had, at one time, 5 sisters and a brother. She was the eldest of the lot. Back then, this meant she had to bear the burden of taking care of everyone, whether she wanted to or not.
My mum never went to secondary school. She regaled every now and then about how fun it was in primary school, a Punjabi school, where she said she enjoyed studying. She told us stories of play, folly, getting in trouble and learning things the hard way. When it was time for her to carry on to higher learning, her parents put a stop to her progress. She had to stay home and help take care of things - cooking, cleaning, washing - all the things any child hated doing. She would need to stay home while her siblings got to live out their ambitions.
She begrudged her parents for that. Being thrust into responsibility at such a young age made her hard, toughened emotionally but at the same time, fragile. She perhaps also bore some animosity towards some of the siblings who did well in school, and had something to be proud of. I think no one really told my mother that she did a good job being a second mom to everyone else, looking after house and home.
In her time at home, she learned to cook at the stiff hands and tough lectures of my grandmother, a lady I never met. She told us, more than once, she got hit on the head with a rolling pin when the chapatis she made were not round. So my sister and I were regularly threatened by our mother in the same way growing up.
She became thorough, precise and fastidious in the kitchen. She learned how to cook by feeling and taste versus measurement and order. Her skills were a talent I didn’t appreciate till I was older, perhaps in my late teens. The way she would work the knife when peeling onions and potatoes, her use of spices and masala powder, and her ability to sometimes experiment after watching a cooking show on TV - all these things were borne from her difficult experiences in the kitchen in a rustic, zinc-roofed kitchen village home in Ipoh.
Almost everything she cooked was brilliant. I loved her dahls and curries, Malay-style mee goreng, sambal prawns, sayur lemak, cakes and muffins. She enjoyed spiced then fried ikan kuning, rasam (a South Indian sour spicy soup) with plain white rice.
I would respond to her queries on what to make for dinner this way “Mummy, whatever you cook, I will eat.” I grew to enjoy her simpler creations - just chappatis, a simple yellow dahl, and long beans fried with onions, chilli and chives (koo chye) formed a meal I relished.
My mum also frequently made a dried prawn sambal akin to sambal belado, in sizeable batches to keep for a month or two in the fridge. Red chillies, onion, garlic, ginger, tomatoes, and tiny dried prawns would go into a blender with water to be poured out into hot oil for frying before some salt was added. She would slightly obsess over the quality of the dried prawns, often complaining to sundry shopkeepers about their poor stock. The whole house would smell of sambal each time he made up a pot, the wonderful scent wafting out along the common HDB corridor to the unsuspecting nostrils of my deprived neighbours. She would use the condiment for anything that needed a spicy umami kick. I would use the sambal liberally in my Maggi noodles, plop a dollop on top of a fried egg, bring it to barbecues as a dip for all kinds of grilled meats, and to make sambal cheese sandwiches. (Yes, the latter works big time. A friend in secondary school,Terence Chen, brought some to school for a class party, the sandwiches neatly stacked in the Gardenia bread wrapper the bread came in. One bite, and I never looked back. I think he had some Peranakan blood in his family and hence the excellent taste.)
Cleanliness became her obsession too. My sis and I were subject to my mum’s maddening tirades on how messy we were as teenagers. We of course had to help clean too, and in that way we learned as she did. One funny outcome of this was her liberal purchase of kitchen towels, and also the need to cover things up - to protect them against dust. Even now, there are at least 20 kitchen towels - the “good” and “expensive” 3M ones in green, blue and purple - in a drawer in my kitchen today. Her standards were high and everyone else’s rooms, homes, kitchens, clothes, faces, children etc. were subject to those criteria.
The other reason why my mum was mad about and with dust, was because she was asthmatic. She contracted the problem when we was a teenager, an outcome of “drinking cold drinks” apparently. She could not break out of the cycle of breathlessness and she bore this chronic illness till her passing. It was also one of my earliest memories of her, being sick, struggling to breathe properly. She would tell us she used to able to run fast as a child, even winning at school meets. I think her confinement to home duties as a teenager robbed her of her physicality and also her health.
I surmise that her asthma was the start of her deteriorating health. She didn’t want to exercise because exercise would make her breathless. Without exercise, my mum put on weight. More weight meant other medical troubles, which came to the fore later. A vicious cycle she couldn’t break.
She met my dad in 1970 I think, through mutual couple friends in Singapore. They married here in 1971. I suspect the reason why my mum married by old man dad and ‘ran way’ 500 kilometres south was because she was tired of her hard life at home. As the eldest, was routinely in trouble for the misdeeds of her siblings. She was also inherently jealous of their more carefree, educated existences. There were perhaps other issues at home which she never really got to talking about. She wanted an escape and that was my father’s hand in marriage. She was willing to uproot her life, not speaking a word of English, to come live in a room in the second storey of a shophouse along Upper Bukit Timah Road, to start again.
Times were tough when we were growing up. As kids however, we never knew it. We were poor but unaware what it meant to have means. A toy was an item of fortune my sister and I shared for months. If it broke, we’d be upset and not ask for anything new because we knew our parents couldn’t afford it. My mum, who never took a paid job before, had to become a factory worker when I was a toddler. My father once told me he never wanted my mother to work outside because he was part of the old school - men worked, women stayed home and looked after the kids. But he got badly sick too while we were kids and my mum had to step up.
When she went to do her afternoon shift work, taking a bus from across the road, my sister and I were left to our own devices. We were told to stay in our room but we never really did. We sneaked down the stairs to play with the neighbours’ children and to hang out at the shops below. I don’t remember much but this memory sticks out - while my sister and I were gallivanting along the shophouse corridor one afternoon, my mum whom we thought had been safely whisked away on a SBS bus to Jurong for work the next several hours, appeared in front of us. We froze, stunned into submission by this now angry giant of a mother. We were publicly scolded and given several lashing of the trusty tool of paediatric punishment, the rotan. It was tough love, the kind my mother was used to getting, and was then meeting out.
A trait my mum had was being good at art. I discovered this in primary school when she would help with my art homework. She liked colours, painting and crafting. I remember she made masks for me to submit as my own creations in Primary 2 or 3. She took pride in ensuring the lines were neat, colours were kept in the right bounds, paper was cut accurately, and kept the pencils, crayons and poster colours neatly back after in the right place. There was trouble later when this lesson in tidying up was not repeated by her children.
My mum could also sew. We had a foot-pedal-powered Singer machine that stuck with us for about another 20 years. My sister and I used it as toy, using our hands and feet to create motion and energy, that ignited our imaginations. Pedal oscillating, wheels moving, threads spinning. This was no sewing machine, this was a train that took us on a journey across the room, across bedlam, the clouds and the sea. We were chugging along in an adventure as the sewing machine creaked in tandem. Of course my mum knew we were using it as a toy and she would scold us for attempting to spoil her toy. Later, we got her an electric machine to do up cushion covers and make little repairs to her punjabi suits. When I was in Spain for a holiday, I was a small replica of that old sewing machine in a curio shop, and bought it as a present for my mum. I think she liked it. It’s still on my display shelf.
My mum got her Singapore PR, and later her citizenship in the 90s. It was bit of struggle, meeting our Yishun MP several times before getting the final ok. She was worried mostly about paying off the HDB flat were living in then, less about losing her identity to a country she didn’t enjoy being part of. In fact, she muttered something to the effect of ‘good riddance’ when I accompanied my mum out of the Malaysian High Commission at Jervois Road after she renounced her citizenship to our neighbour to the north. Summarily, the Malaysian civil service wasn’t known for its efficiency (perhaps things have changed now) and we had waited a good four hours, a whole afternoon, before we could submit our documents for processing and approval. I recall one woman was working that day while two of her male colleagues chatted and joked in full view of all other persons waiting to dump their Malaysian identities, in a small room on one side of the main building. My mum hated waiting, and being treated like a second-class citizen by the people running (and ruining) her country of birth.
She looked after my dad in his later years. He was practically bedridden and required almost constant care. She would feed, wash and entertain him. She took him out on the wheelchair on walks around the neighbourhood. It was a tough job, one I didn’t understand or appreciate till recently. Who knew what caregiver stress was back then. After he passed in early 2008, I could sense her loss intermingled with a sense of relief.
Later that same year, my nephew was born. I think my mum was the happiest looking after this little bundle of laughter, poop and joy. She liked babies and this one took her time, effort and consideration completely. I could never really take a photo of my mum smiling until this little attention grabber made her glow. She spent a lot of time with him, till he was in primary 5 or 6 when he had to spend more time in school in preparation for the big exam. I could feel she became a tad lost then, lonely.
I wasn’t a great son then. We got into arguments about simple things, her over-cooking and over-cleaning mostly. She was bored. She would move the furniture every other month. I had asked her several times to volunteer her time but she refused, not willing to try new things. Getting her to travel was like pulling teeth. Her sense of adventure had waned into routine and quiet submission.
One thing at my mum suffered from as a result of her leaving school so early was her inability to make and sustain friendships. She met people but didn’t feel inclined to maintain contact with them. There was a Chinese lady my mum often talked about during and after her factory operator days, someone I thought she considered a friend. My mum apparently met her again much later, and when she told me about the encounter, I asked if she got her phone number. My mum replied “What for?”. Her independence, translated into loneliness, was killing her.
She also didn’t want a helper at home. She frequently insisted she could cook and clean as well as any other homemaker. She would drag her Fairprice trolley to the market on her own, wandering through the neighbourhood and spending time at the market, having some sneaky breakfast. She’d also tend to her plants, all potted or hung along the HDB corridor. She was fiercely trying to be herself, and holding on to her pride as she got older.
Thinking back, I regret the cold shoulder periods we went through after our fights. I was being inconsiderate, always sure I was right when I couldn’t go beyond my logical brain to understand what she was going through.
Her independent behaviour also translated into stubbornness and mistrust sometimes. Her health suffered because of it. She would go to her regular polyclinic appointments but didn’t want anyone to come along. She kept her illnesses to herself. The big change came when she had to face diabetes. She could hide her pills but not the insulin vials in the fridge. Even then she would not allow us to take care of her meds and injections.
There were appointments with specialists she would intentionally miss, citing that the hospital was too far, or the costs were too high. These excuses perhaps led her to become increasingly sicker later. One a few occasions I would come home and she’d lament how she had a fall while cleaning the ceiling fan or changing the curtains. I would be slightly stunned but she would assure me she was fine, that saw a Chinese doctor or applied some medicinal patch to ease her pains. She would not want additional treatment at my suggestion and concern. One time, when I did bring her to the A&E for pain, the doc asked if she had fallen and broke her foot in the past year. He saw an abnormality in her bone formation from an x-ray. No fall to my recollection but apparently my mum kept this quiet and the bones set themselves on their own, awkwardly. Stubborn mummy kept mum.
This past year though had been especially tough on her. She missed a step and fell when coming home from the market. She broke her right knee. This was in May 2020 during the height of our Covid lockdown. She had an operation for it and spent the next 3 months in a community hospital recuperating, leaning to walk again. I recall she missed the general election.
Her need for independence perhaps drove her to overcome the pain to get back to “normal”. In that time, however, the doctors came to my sister and I to talk about her mental health. They suspected the onset of dementia. Her bones were healing but her mind was going. When I brought her home in August, it was tough time for her getting used to things. Her dementia made that worse. I had also figure out how to manage her meds, for her chronic conditions and her new difficulties.
In September, my mum was back in hospital because she had a bleed in the head. Her blood thinning meds were working too well, causing the end of the capillaries in her head to leak. The accumulation of blood was causing her to lose cognitive function and motor skills. When I called for the ambulance, she had trouble getting up from the daybed. So she had to endure another operation to alleviate the swelling.
When she got home after a few weeks in Sengkang Hospital, her dementia seemed worse. Daily, I had to be on guard for her tantrums. Some days, she was manageable, following along with my lead for eating, going out and doing things around the house. Other days, she’d not remember where the bathroom was, over-season the food or not know how to turn on the TV. Being logical with her didn’t work, especially when she felt slighted or upset. My rational side couldn’t entirely accept it and I lost my temper quite often. The stress got to me.
I got a helper at the end of September, a not-so-simple matter this time of Covid-19 precautions across borders. My mum and the helper had a rollercoaster of a relationship. At times they got along, even laughing together as they watched a Hindi film on TV. Other times, my mum would be terribly nasty towards her, and the helper would end up in tears. This first helper is a 40+ year old Indonesian woman who was very compassionate and aware of what it took to manage a patient with dementia. When my mum and I would argue, the helper would ask me to calm down because being loud and angry didn’t help ease my mum’s concerns, no matter how ridiculous or off-tangent they were.
After a couple of weeks, a routine sort of set in. I would administer my mum’s meds a few times a day while my helper would cook and clean. We would attempt leaving home for a walk or a trip somewhere on the MRT once a day. In the afternoons and evenings, my mum would nap, watch TV, and hit the bed by about 830pm. She wouldn’t sleep and needed to engage in banter with my helper who cleverly realised this quirk. With the helper around, I had some time for myself in the evenings which I occupied with exercise or meeting friends. The situation seemed workable.
Every other day or so, I would try to engage her in some colouring. She enjoyed doing so, and it became a matter of pride for her. In fact, she became possessive of the activity. When I asked the helper to join her, she angrily scolded me, saying she could not “share this work”. I also brought her colouring pencils and outline templates to keep her active and not bothering the nurses when she was warded.
At about the end of 2020, my mum started complaining of stomach pains which necessitated adjusting her diet with bland food, more milk and gastric meds. Since then, this pain plus other ailments required multiple visits to the hospital, often ending up in week-long stays. She even endured several nasal swabs across some stays due to simple symptoms of fever and cough. There were a couple of occasions when the A&E nurses simply swept her off to another part of the hospital premise because of these symptoms and told me to go home. I guess in the past year, my mother had been hospitalised a good 8-10 times. I also kept her family in Malaysia abreast of developments via Whatsapp.
Most recently, my mum was diagnosed with liver cirrhosis, the hardening of a part of the organ. This was the source of her stomach pain. The mass also affected the bile duct and caused her spleen to swell up. This ate up her platelets, and their count declined to very low levels. This meant treatment was going to be complicated as any invasive procedure could result in uncontrollable bleeding. So the doctors tried to increase the platelet count with steroids but that didn’t seem to be working quickly enough. Some weeks ago, my mum became slow to respond and was sluggish in her behaviour. This was similar to when she had the head bleed in September. So I called 995 and they took her away. I didn’t get to see my mum for more than two weeks because I was in quarantine and so was she, due to an unexpected exposure to a Covid-19 patient at TTSH.
When I saw my mum again, she was not quite as aware anymore. The doctors told me her liver condition was progressing more aggressively than expected. As a result, the toxins the liver would normally clean out were accumulating in her blood. This would cause her brain to slowly shut down. She would get more and more drowsy, before simply sleeping her way till her passing. This was hard to hear. Admittedly, I had somewhat expected her not to survive too long with her unremedied platelet count but this was coming too soon.
It became somewhat touch and go. When I saw my mum for the first time after quarantine, she was awake, able to talk and understand my words, and I could feed her. She told me her stomach hurt and I asked the nurse for painkillers. There was another intravenous site at my mum’s abdomen to take in liquid painkillers. The nurses mentioned morphine and fentanyl.
Two Fridays ago, I fed her a dinner of mixed brown rice with fried gourds and tomato-ish chicken. I also gave her HL milk, her favourite, to drink plus a couple of tears of Polar sugar roll. It was her last meal. When I left her at about 8pm, she had fallen asleep. My sister visited after that and she said my mum was calling my name out loud. Later that evening, while I was almost asleep the hospital called. The lady doctor informed me that my mum’s blood pressure had become low and it was a risky situation. I called my sister and we both headed down to SGH. When I got to my mum’s bedside, she was hooked up to a sodium chloride drip and a machine that took her BP regularly. My mum looked the same as when I left her but a million things were running through my head. I held her hand, fearing the inevitable. Fortunately and unexpectedly, it was not her time yet. Her BP regained strength while her other vital signs remained acceptable. I left after 1am while my sister stayed over.
The situation repeated itself over the next few days - a plummeting BP that recovered after a while. The entire time my mum didn’t wake up though. No food, only fluids fed intravenously. I spent most of the day with my mum over the next few days. I would comb her hair when I got there, sat down beside her, and held her hand as I talked to her a little. I played her Hindi love songs from the 80s while patting her arm or leg to the beats of percussion. She would move a little now and then, when I wiped her lips with moistened tissues or when I patted her feet.
On Tuesday afternoon, a doctor came around to attend to a neighbouring patient. He saw me and came over. We had a bit of a chat about what my mum was going through. Dr Toh explained the rapid progression of her liver cirrhosis, her current fidgeting, how ammonia accumulating in the brain was causing her to be unresponsive, and how the heart was trying to keep the BP up but would eventually fail. He said it could be days or weeks, but death was likely anytime at this point. He was clear and sufficiently thorough. I appreciated that. No more guesswork.
On the morning of the 26th, Dr Toh called me at about 830am. He said my mum’s BP had fallen again. My sister was already on her way down to the ward when I called her. We stood there besides my mum, distracted by the beeping machine and the numbers it displayed. My mum’s blood pressure was undetectable though her heart beat was hovering at about 50. Suddenly, I saw the pulse rate plummet - 53, 24, 12, 0, dash. It was 953am. It took about about 10 seconds for the numbers to dwindle, and simultaneously I could feel my heart throb faster and harder. I called the nurse over to check. She hit the print button and a long sheet of graph paper with a dark almost flat line slowly spit out. The nurse announced that there was still a heart beat. I strangely started to laugh. Now all the nurses had was a paper print out to inform them if my mum had passed. All other technology had failed. Whatever we saw on TV was no longer real. Faux flatlines. The nurse advised that a flatline for a full minute was required for medical reasons to declare a passing. But yeah, my mother was no longer with us.
A doctor came over, made her inspection and declared time of death as 1006 am.
The mood was sombre and yet we knew she was no longer in pain. That made us feel better a little.
The next few days were interesting, probably an adjective you the reader didn’t think I’d use. Due to Covid-19 restrictions, funerals in Singapore now have limits. Only 8 persons allowed at the mortuary, and 20 allowed at the crematorium. My aunts and their families in Malaysia couldn’t attend. As a process, the certificate of death comes first. I was given a temporary COD to bring down to a police station to get the official piece of paper. My brother-in-law, his son and I walked down to the Bukit Merah East NPC at Cantonment Complex, adjacent to SGH, to get this sorted. It was done pretty quickly though it would have been nice if the young officers would have started the conversation with a condolence before moving on to formalities.
The nurse at my mum’s ward has advised I needed to inform the mortuary managers when I would be collecting the deceased, since It wasn’t an immediate claim. So I had to get on to the NEA cremation booking website to figure out the dates and times available. Guess what? Lots of people were getting cremated and the earliest realistic date was 2 days later. I couldn’t confirm a slot through the NEA site though I made a ‘soft-booking’ over the phone. After meeting up with the Sikh Welfare Council folks the next morning on religious rites, my nephew and I went to Mandai to confirm the cremation appointment. $100 later (cash NOT accepted by the way), we were issued 20 entry coupons for guests. We then made our way to the SGH mortuary to inform the officer there of our intentions. He already knew my name because the SWC folks had made a pre-emptive call. The next afternoon, my mum’s body was cleansed and prepared. She was laid in her casket, and we made our journey to Mandai. There, everything took on a routine guided by the Sikh priest and the hearse driver. By evening time, we had final passage readings at the Central Sikh Temple.
The next day, I made my way down to Mandai to queue to collect ashes. The priest had called me the night before to inform me of this first come first served process and he didn’t want any delays because he had an 11am activity to run. So I was there first, without any other souls in sight, though a monkey did show up to peruse a nearby dustbin. All said and done, by 9am we were on our way to Changi. There, further complication ensured - only 2 persons were allowed per boat. (Someone will be getting a slightly unpleasant email about this next week.) So the priest and I were on one vessel, my brother-in-law and his son took another. My sister waited on shore with my helper. The sky was dark and the seas were grey. Some rain pelted down to make things a tad slippery. Once the boats aligned and tethered, we waited for the bobbing to subside a little before proceeding with final prayers and scattering of ashes. Mummy joined my dad in the same waters. I bade her goodbye for the last time.
Though resigned to the fact, I have a feeling the next few weeks will be a little tough when I clear and keep her things away. The simple things - her hairbands, the towel she kept with her, the medicated oil bottle, the toothpicks, her inhaler - will scream her presence the most.
Her many meds, I don’t know what to do with them.
https://obituaries.siwec.org/61-obituaries/303-jerkinder-kaur
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