2026 - 002 Musing | Maintenance Medicine
It was the vividness that was impressed on me first.
I saw her halving the tablets with a knife on the table top of her sewing machine. She mumbled about making it last and prioritizing patriarch’s medicine first. She said my father would burst in anger if he saw his own supply started to dwindle. The younger me, already in late teens was always slow on the uptake, so I just watched her, barely listening.
But it caught up with me. Decades after, when I turned 40 to be exact. The vividness became realization rendered by words naivety cannot. I spent hours extracting samples from the recesses of my mind. Sometimes I will dissect them in quiet walks I take. Or in the bus. A private silent movie I watch over and over again, among the many. I am a sadist in this regard as far as nostalgia is concern. Nostalgia is indeed a slow dance in a big circle, to quote the writer Isabel Allende.
And now, every time I pop my own medicine, all I can think of is her, that vivid moment, and her sacrifices. This include her pain and frustration. The grit. I wonder about her choices when she made she was young. Was there any regret? Why did I learn to empathize so late, when it actually mattered? She deserved a embrace in that very moment. I bet she felt so alone.
At 11:27 PM , June 26, it would be exactly half a year since the our goodbye.
Notes & References:
- Book - My Invented Country by Isabel Allende