Your birthday is tomorrow and we haven’t put you to rest yet. You’ve been gone eight months and if the world hadn’t flipped upside down, we would have returned your ashes to the islands by now.
I always associated planes and travel with you. You met us at the Honolulu airport every summer and flew out to spend the holidays with us every fall. Now the last place I want to be is on a floating aircraft with recycled oxygen and a hundred breathing mouths.
I miss hearing you say my name. You didn’t say it the way haoles say it, but the way only Hawaiians and people of Hawai’i say it, the way it’s supposed to be said. Noy. Noy-eh. Noe. The cadence, the rise and fall like a rolling wave. Is it bad that I only remember your voice, and no words of wisdom?
No. You taught me by living.
Moral. Obsessively tidy. Calm. Funny. Strong. You were many things I’m not and many things I have yet to discover about myself. Your chuckle was sunlight. And the things that surprised you were surprising to me: how a clear sky could suddenly beget rain; how it would stop just as suddenly; how large the lunch plate was; how massive the slice of cake seemed; how fast the car was going; how wonderfully bright and fresh a morning could be.
I can see your raised eyebrows, your smile, your lips round as you mouth, Wow! And, in the case of the cake, you saying, Are you going to eat all that? You, who never left a morsel on your plate, baffled by my gluttony.
What did you do with your days? We would chat on the phone for just a few minutes each month, and when the phone hung up, what then? After you had your coffee, finished reading the newspaper, made breakfast, watched TV, paid the bills, turned the radio off, ate the lunch Grandpa picked up? What was your childhood like with twelve brothers and sisters? Why did you never talk about Ira, the first man you married, the one whose fighter pilot was never found? You would like the man I love, Grandma — you met him, though you don’t remember.
The last five years you weren’t you.
And even though you weren’t you anymore, you still knew deep down somewhere that you weren’t on O’ahu. “I want to go back to Hawai’i,” you said, half-knowing, half-gone. You couldn’t even make your own meal but were prepared to pack your bags. Unable to remember that your parents had long passed, but ready to risk everything in search of home.
You were always cold in California, even before winter really settled in. The crisp fifties of the Golden State could never soothe you like the balmy eighties of Hawai’i.
Summer has come and the humid air in San Francisco reminds me of days on the island, sticky, sweaty afternoons when I lay on a twin bed reading or sat on the porch and painted my nails baby blue. You were always there — tapping a frame as you passed by, raking the leaves, making sure things were in place. And then you were always here, but instead you were napping, asking for cookies, telling us to turn off the lights because people are sleeping. Alarmed, you saw figures, shadows moving outside the windows. You asked about the man with the truck, what he was doing. When we looked, no one was there.
But you’re still here, and that’s the strange thing about creating life and perpetuating a lineage that began long before you. It means that you live on, that you share your history with generations to come. That you’re always continuing someone else’s story without even knowing it.
Grandma, you gave me Honolulu. You gave life to the woman who gave me life. My blood is Chinese, Hawaiian, my blood is your blood.
When I bite my tongue and taste salt, I’ll think of you.
Catch up on past installments of interior monologue: