Those Sunday Rides And Christmases

2092 words

Those Sunday Rides and Christmases By Yuska Lutfi Tuanakotta

Those Sunday Rides and Christmases

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There was a period in my life when my family traveled all the way from Jakarta to Bogor every Sunday. Mom would drive our old family car – the one with a rather weird system of air conditioning and not so effective window film sheets – to Bogor and back. We usually went in the morning and returned in the afternoon under the scorching sun. To protect ourselves from the heat, we would take out sheets from a Sunday newspaper and clamp them on the windows, et voila, some sort of paper blinds were created. Of course by the time we got home, the Sunday paper was so badly torn that only a few parts was readable.

That was eons ago when I was a child, when my eldest sister was still in senior high school. It was an era when we could have ‘quality time’ without being forced to do so. In fact, the term ‘quality time’ was unfamiliar to us because every moment spent automatically became a quality time on its own.

Now things have changed so much. My siblings and I have grown apart. Not because we don’t love each other, not because we don’t care, but simply because we have different worlds with different sets of activities and friends. Our worlds ceased to connect and we no longer speak the same language, the language of children. For the last decade, we’ve been traveling less and less to Bogor for many reasons, one of them is Mom being unable to drive through the toll road at her age anymore. I have learned to drive and when I got my first car, I was almost always out every weekend with my friends, going to places that seemed so important to us, more important than spending a Sunday afternoon with my own family.

So what’s in Bogor?

Well, first of all, the weather. At least some years ago the air in Bogor was still so very clean. It is near the mountains so the air was refreshingly cool, at least for those who didn’t want to bother themselves with driving further up to Puncak. I couldn’t remember a Sunday, whether it was in February or August, when our visit wasn’t welcomed by a single drop of rain. During that epoch, Bogor lived up to its title as the rainy city.

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Second of all, the more important thing was that most of my Dad’s family lived in Bogor. Dad was born into quite a large family. He grew up with five siblings who eventually got out of Bogor and lived in several parts in Indonesia. I have an aunt who lives in Kupang, Nusa Tenggara Timur, an uncle who lives in Surabaya in East Java and another uncle who lives in Cibinong – a city just outside Bogor. Another uncle later moved to Jakarta. Dad’s father – my grandpa – lived with one of my aunts together in that house. I was always told that my Grandma was a vivacious, fun-loving, a sort of that hippie-rocker-chick, completely different with her rather silent, introverted husband. I never got a chance to know her, though. She died of cancer several years before I was born.

I really enjoyed the Sundays. That was the time when my uncle and his family in Cibinong would come there and after going to church, my cousins and I would play with Grandpa’s dogs or watch anything on the vintage tube television. Sometimes my uncle from Jakarta would come as well. And there were Sundays when my aunt from Kupang or my uncle from Surabaya would stand in the doorway, surprisingly greeting us. But if they weren’t there, then there were still the Christmases. There are not so many rooms in Granpa’s house, but each room has either three beds or one big bed. Each room can accommodate a family.

Every year, we would go to Bogor and stay in Granpa’s house from December 23rd until December 25th. After church on Christmas Eve, we would sit on the blue rug in the television room and do the annual midnight prayer, extinguishing all the lights and used candles instead. The next day after the morning Christmas mass, we would go back to Grandpa’s home and stuff ourselves with bowls of delicious macaronis and chocolate cakes that my aunt had prepared. Christmas soon became my favorite holiday.

Whenever my parents gathered with my aunts and uncles in the living room while the children played in the garden, I would sneak in and jump on Mom’s lap to rest. I pretended to rest but I was actually listening to the ‘grown-ups’ conversations and got lost in them talking about stuff like mucus,

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gangrene, cancer, cardiac-arrest, cholesterol, stamina, blisters, things that I didn’t know the meaning then but I was sure they could only mean something bad. They would discuss about diseases, each person comparing what he or she had contracted, and although they shared tips on how to avoid a certain disease, I also remember each one telling the others about his or her sickness with a totally absurd sense of pride. It was as if they had been trying to outdo each other by showing off their illnesses.

It wasn’t until a few years ago when I was conversing with my friends after graduating from university, that I came to realize there’s an evolution of topic as we age. There’s an evolution of perception as we grow up. Things don’t just stay the way they are. What we’ve seen, heard, felt, scented, tasted, what we’ve experienced through our senses, and then some, would evolve and change our thoughts. Some even change the fundamental ones, the thoughts that have shaped us from the very beginning. The things we experienced challenge us, or to some extent even force us, to abandon our ideas and rules, those we’ve lived by all our lives, and create or adopt new ones.

I remember picking up Hans Christian Andersen’s book and read “Little Mermaid” and found that it has a completely different ending than the one made by Disney. At first I thought it wasn’t fair that Disney wasn’t being true and respectful to Andersen and his work, but I later figured that children might not be able to cope with such deep and profound sadness of not being able to be with the one they love. The same thing happened when Disney recreated Victor Hugo’s “Hunchback of Notre Dame”. Quasimodo lived on in the animation, hailed as a hero, while he died in the book, sacrificing his life to the Parisians.

And maybe that’s why as we age, we see and discuss things so differently. When I was a child, I would play with no care in the world with my cousins, making noises at church and therefore embarrassing my parents as I struggle between skipping Sunday school or watching the morning cartoon shows on the television. As I grew up as a teenager, I would rebel, do, acquire unimportant stuff and follow whatever fad or trend there was at the moment and struggled with finishing high

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school. Then later in university, with my peer, I would talk about finishing dozens of the weekly assignments, sharing tips on internships and summer jobs, go to the mall and spend our allowance on movies, and finally choose the topic for our graduation thesis and struggle to complete it. Upon graduating, we would talk about getting jobs we prefer, about how this company or that establishment had called us for interviews and psychoanalysis and yet we failed for reasons unknown. And after struggling, finally, one by one, we got a job.

In our mid and late twenties, we would gossip about our bosses, the cute coworker in another division, a colleague who could backstab an entire division with his or her sharp tongue, and I got to see my friends getting engaged, getting married, then getting pregnant, and having a child, or maybe two or three. Then we would discuss about weddings, about pregnancy, about raising children, about breastfeeding and which milk or baby formula is the best, and about the extreme yet a bit hilarious trouble that one friend felt when she had to leave her cats due to her pregnancy. She didn’t see them for about five months and she was totally devastated.

And then it dawned on me that I too, one day, with my friends, will be discussing the two D’s: disease and death, just like my parents, aunts, and uncles in Grandpa’s living room. How a friend would most possibly die from overeating and another would die of over-exercising at the gym. And maybe, like my parents, aunts, and uncles, we would laugh at the face of disease, at the face of death, only because we were accompanied by our friends, our brothers, and sisters, in the camaraderie.

Sure, with all the development in the science world, new things to prolong life are being invented by the hour: an elixir of eternal youth, an ointment that smoothens out the wrinkles, a holistic diet that adds years to our life. And somehow, the romantic notion of vampires and immortal beings becomes cherished and worshipped.

But I don’t want to live forever. I know several people who died in agony, in despair, in hopeless state years after they’d experienced the loss of their loved ones. Those people had changed after the loss.

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They were no longer capable of a wide, cheerful, sincere smile. They could no longer walk upright. They started to bear a burden, a cross on their backs that slowly, but surely, bent them down until they can no longer move and that death became the only remedy. I believe Grandpa was one of those people.

In fact, in the cases of the aftermath of a big, traumatic loss, or old age whether disease-free or disease-ridden, death, with natural causes of course, acts as a savior. It reminds us that there’s something else out there, beyond life, an assurance. In those cases, death is a step that one must finally take to be free.

But death comes after life. And it is up to us to make life worth living. We don’t know whether it’ll be eternal bliss or eternal damnation afterwards. We don’t know for certain if there is such a thing as eternal bliss or eternal damnation. What we do know, and what we can do, is to make Heaven on Earth. I’m not one to tell how to do it because the concept of Paradise is different from one to another. But I do remind myself constantly that our time to live is very short. If a butterfly can make use of the 24 hours that the Creator has given to her, surely our time span can be used with more wisdom.

Mom has lost all of her family. Her father died when she was young. I got to know my other Grandma before she died when I was a child. She lived in Cirebon and I remember how I used to cry in the paddy wagon when we left Grandma’s home to catch the early train. Mom’s only sibling, my uncle, died of cancer not long after Grandma died. But instead of succumbing into depression and sadness, Mom takes care of us, dismissing the deaths and the fact that all members of her nuclear family have left her behind. She assumed the role of her mother as our mother and humbly acknowledges that she is part of something great, something called the cycle of life.

In the end, we must be ready to embrace death or let it embrace us when we feel that we have lived life to the fullest, lived it with just enough regrets and mistakes to overlook and be forgiven. Death, like everything else in life, will eventually come to us.

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But when the time comes, I don’t want to be scared. I want to look at death in its face and say that I am ready. Ready for another Sunday ride to Bogor with my entire family to meet my aunts, uncles, and cousins, ready to play with my long-gone cats and friends, ready to meet my Grandparents again and finally get to know my funky Grandma, and maybe have Christmas all the time, including the chocolate cakes.

I want to be ready when death comes. And I will be ready.

After all, I have more time than I need to prepare for it. In fact, I have an entire lifetime.