Here's to Slugger Chiang!

Someone on the Catholic-moms group got me thinking about grandad today. These days, he is not often on my mind. Only during mass when the priest says something like: "welcome our departed brothers and sisters into your kingdom." Someone told me then that I should name the loved and the lost and they will be remembered, their time in purgatory shortened by the mention and the prayer. I try like mad to recite the names of my loved and lost, but I can never catch up - the priest moves on so quickly and I wonder if my list made it to heaven in time.

But other than that, these days, slugger chiang is not consciously on my mind. Until today.

Old Slugger Chiang. Boxer, medicine man, mechanic, wife-beater, dog-lover. Dementia sufferer.

Yes, my late grandfather had dementia. It came on gradually but within a few years, he had lost all knowledge and memory of us. Yes it is sad, but yet in a way, it also isn't. I don't know whether this is called karma or purgatory on earth or just paying for his sins (I don't know how to put this sensitively). But his BD (before dementia) days and AD (after dementia) days were radically different ones showing 180deg changes to his personality.

BD he was fierce, with a short fuse and an explosive temper. I still remember the infamous stories about how he used to beat my grandmother, my mother, my uncle. Fling things, fling people. A famous one was about how he threw a chair at my mother and my 8-month preggie grandma got in the way to take the blow. The chair landed squarely on the belly. The baby died. My grandma told the doctor she fell down the stairs. Why did he behave like this? Frustration? Poverty? He was not a drinker, a smoker, a womaniser or an inveterate gambler, but times were hard and the money was scarce, what with the war and all.

Why would my grandma marry a man like this? And yet, according to my grandma, it was a love match. In the days when match-making was common - particularly for a girl from a privileged perankan family as hers, she refused to be match-made and chose slugger. To the appalled amazement of her family.

Slugger tried to make ends meet. He was a mechanic with the British army. But when they pulled out, he lost his job. Then he tried to sell medicine. I remember going on rides with him to the kampongs, along bumpy dusty tracks, where at the destination, he would open his briefcase and show - wow - the whole paraphernalia of colourful bottles, boxes, tablets etc. It was fascinating.

At one point, he even boxed professionally for money. Hence the moniker Slugger Chiang. He wasn't half bad I think. But all the aggression, the rage, the pain, the injury must have gotten to him somehow. And so he was short-tempered and blew up in terrible rages. Yet I have also heard of a softer side - about how his favourite child was his second daughter, who would dance out to him when he returned after a hard day's work and call him "Papa!". He loved the girl and how his heart must have broken when they had to give the child away to lessen the burden for food and shelter. At less than two years of age, she was given away to a barren couple - my grand-mother's brother and his wife. It was the belief at the time that this would help a barren couple conceive. They did - but that's a whole other story.

Did the loss of his little girl cut so deep that the fuse just got shorter and shorter?

I don't know. But he was always kind though gruff and like, most Asian patriarchs, leaning to the stern and incommunicative at times. And then there was his infamous temper. I still remember him chasing me and grandma round the house with a chopper until we hysterically locked ourselves in the bedroom! It sounds really funny now and I can even smile, but back then, it was damn frightening!

But I have good memories mostly - how he would take me to the movies - the old pontianak movies, the crappy thai horror movies about snakes, crocodiles and black magic, the kungfu movies which are now classics... how he would take me on long drives to Changi beach, passing lovely green jungle, open fields, kampongs, swaying coconut trees and when we were in the sea, how I would cling on to his hand and still feel safe. Grandad was barrel-chested - a big man and with him, I knew nothing would harm me. I have good memories of how he used to play that old song "Hey Fatty Bom-Bom! Sugar-sugar dumpling!" and dance with me. And then when he took care of my baby brother, how he would gently and patiently rock the sarong cradle and sing tunelessly "Rock, rock, rock!"

When my aunt gave him a smelly and flea-infested shih-tzu, how he loved it and treated it like his own child. They would jog together - the fat, short-legged pooch panting and scurrying along beside him. And when the dog died, how sad he was. He never got another dog.

Then one day, I think in 1990, he fell while jogging. And while he recovered from that, it was really the slow route to the end because he was never the same again. He lost the old vitality and strength. And slowly, but surely, his mind.

He finally passed away on New Year's Day 2001. At the end, he was like a little child. Very innocent and so trusting, so loving. It was hard watching him go bit by bit. In his last years, I was introduced to him all over again whenever I visited him. And five minutes later, he would get this blank, polite look and ask, "Hello, who are you?" and introductions came all over again. It was darkly, heartbreakingly funny. He had a stately gentleness with little children - including my own. And they were never afraid of him or frustrated. They laughed and played as comrades. He enjoyed cartoons.

We're Catholics. So we believe in purgatory, in hell, in paying for our sins, in life after death and the whole shebang. My mom, my grandad's daughter, said once: that we pay for our sins - whether in purgatory when we die or on earth when we are alive. She thought grandad's dementia more than paid for his sins on earth.

Yes, he was violent and abusive when he was a younger man and yet by the time he died, he was the gentlest soul alive -wouldn't even hurt a fly. Losing his identity, his ability to care for himself, his autonomy and his very self, the loss of his very life and all his memories and personality may seem to us who still have these, as something so hard, so tragic and painful.

But yet, in a way, it is so redemptive. When he died, we just knew - this man at his death, did not belong in purgatory or anywhere near hell, for all his sins when he was 'alive'. He had more than paid for them all. And when he died, he was, in essence, just a toddler, a child. Innocent and trusting and loving. It was so ironic yet fitting. I think we have never loved him more than when he was so totally lost to us.

Still, I love and remember him for his strength as a younger man, his fearlessness and at the end, his sweetness. His niche at the columbarium says: I fought the good fight.

I think he did.