Regina's autobiography

Hi, here's an excerpt of my autobiography about my grandparents.

She died soon after I turned fourteen. I was horrified to see her lying stiff on a hospital bed. Her head was bound by a scarf that made her look as if she suffered from a toothache. (Later Mom told me the scarf was used to keep her jaw from dropping.) Grandpa, her long-term enemy, someone who responded to her harangues simply by bowing his head to not look at her, did something that surprised me – he rubbed his head against his wife’s torso back and forth, calling her name in such an intimate way that was foreign to me.

Two months after Nign-nign passed away, Grandpa checked into the same hospital for lung cancer. Mom and I visited him. His wiry white hair stood unruly on the pillow. I guess he was happy to see us even though he did not smile. I had never seen him smile. Mom went to the other side of his bed and told me to hold his hand as she held the other. I wrinkled my nose to show her that I was uncomfortable to do so. I had never touched him, either. Mom glared back at me, so I reluctantly picked up his fragile hand. His skin turned out to be slippery and cold. He turned to look at me long and hard, as if he had never looked at me before and would never look at me again. I became self-conscious of his gaze and cast my eyes down his blanket. “Grandpa appreciates you holding his hand,” Mom said softly. Grandpa passed away a few weeks after our visit.

Life continued flowing seamlessly after my grandparents’ death. It seemed to me the lives of Nign-nign and Grandpa were for nothing else but for death. I knew neither where they came from nor where they were going. Sometimes I wondered how my memory of them would have altered had I known them before she realized that he refused to bring salaries home but sent the full amount to his handicapped and illiterate sons in China, before she found her freedom and first job in a foreign land, before they escaped to Taiwan from their homeland, before life meant cancers and death to them.