Today, A Dozen Years Ago

On this day, twelve years ago, my great ancestor died the death of the body. Today, in my 200th post in this blog, I shall remember things of his essence, and what they meant to me.

1. "That's a rook." "Why does it look like a castle?" "Hrmm. Well, that's what it is too." And so I learnt to play chess, aged four. I know I wasn't five yet, because I remember sight-reading the 1972 World Championship games between Robert J Fischer and Boris Vasilievich Spassky. I took me years before I could beat him - my grandfather, that is.

2. It was he who first detected my colour-blindness. Who would have known that stamp-collecting could have gone so far towards compensating for that woeful genetic lapse? Now, with years of neurobiology aiding us, we know that the brain can be retrained to compensate for almost any loss which isn't total. How on earth did Grandfather know?

3. Early morning piano-playing. Again, it took me years to figure out his game. It was all a joke of sorts - one day, I picked up the scores he had uncharacteristically left lying around on the music-stand. Chopin's Nocturnes, forsooth; Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, as well. I always wondered whether anyone else had figured it out.

4. Slightly less-early morning house calls. I used to accompany him on his rounds, when he visited the old, infirm, unwell, and hypochondriac. He would tell me about how fingers told him stories, how the pulse and the rush of air in the lungs spoke volumes. And he taught me how to read the Latin inscriptions on his pharmacy bottles.

5. That, of course, led to the gift of a small koiné Greek New Testament, and his sister's (my grandaunt's) invaluable notes. He read Hebrew too, but I drew the line there, not too confident of a language with shifting vowels. I remember consuming endless slices of my grandmother's rich chocolate fudge cake while he pointed out things and worked on his Bible study notes for the church newsletter. I remember now that his own father had helped translate the Bible into peranakan Malay.

There are many ways in which my life would have been much less richer without him and his wife, my grandma. I would never have learnt to assemble archives, never have learnt the virtues of teak as a building material or oil of wintergreen as a painkiller. I would never have learnt to make cobwebs from plastic cement. I would never have learnt the drastic oxidising properties of potassium manganate(VII). You can see the in memoriam notice in today's newspapers. But such reminders of mortality teach us nothing of the people they commemorate.

And today, a dozen years ago, I see (as through a glass darkly) his breathing stop and my grandmother weep. His last words were, "...and underneath are the everlasting arms." The morphine bottle by his bedside stood unused and full, the antidote to his only fear. His mortal vessel lay on the bed, fully used but empty. I will never forget that evening - because I was late by a few minutes, and was not there.