About my Mom

Last week, she passed away.

She had to be put to sleep because the doctor needed to set a ventilator on her. But she didn’t respond after that. She was gone, just like that, in her sleep. I don’t think she knew, she probably thought she was going to sleep for a while, but in the end, she didn’t wake up.

This is something new for me. Feeling empty and lost, like there’s something missing in me, in my life. What was there is now gone. Forever. I tried to process everything through the past week. Every little thing from the beginning.

We thought everything went pretty smoothly for her. She got admitted to a good hospital. Even though she had to wait for a couple of days and went through very uncomfortable situations, but in the end, she got the best room at the hospital. The nurses kept telling her that she was lucky to get that room. Her overall condition was good, it’s just her lungs that were pretty weak. My sister and I noticed this when we checked her oxygen level a couple of weeks back. And on that morning call, the last call, her voice sounded very loud and strong. She even said her blood sugar level was good. When my sister and brother picked up her stuff after they moved her to another room, one nurse told them that our Mom was very active.

That’s why, we didn’t expect she would pass away that afternoon, but we already feared the worst. I hope she at least wouldn’t feel hurt. I hope she knew that we were all waiting for her and love her so much.

I resigned from my job 6 weeks before moving here to Amsterdam. I received an offer to postpone my resignation until two weeks before my flight but I refused. I said that I want to spend those 6 weeks with my family, without the disturbance of any online meetings. I’ll never regret making that decision. Because during those 6 weeks I got really close to my family, especially with my Mom. We talked and learned a lot about each other.

She told me that before this pandemic, I was always coming home looking angry. I realized that I used to come home carrying the stress from work. It should be a good thing when she had all of her family members together at home, but I made her sad by carrying anger in my heart at that time. She said she was worried that I didn’t have any friends because of that.

I think I noticed this myself because I already had a plan to ask my manager if I was allowed to schedule working from home once every month. Somehow, weekends were not enough anymore for me to recharge from work. I was even going to a meditation class, practiced breathing, and did more yoga. In other words, I was looking for help.

When I finally worked from home because of this pandemic, at some point I was stressed out and felt locked up, but finally became a lot happier because I was with my family. I didn’t have to sit in front of my laptop all the time. I could join an online meeting while doing something to help my Mom, for example. And my Mom saw the difference. She also realized that I actually have a lot of friends when I received gifts on my birthday and during the Christmas holiday.

Before I left, she said that she can finally let me go wholeheartedly because she believed that if I could make friends in Jakarta, then I would be able to do that as well in Amsterdam. She wanted to make sure that I would stay happy and surrounded by good friends. She wanted to make sure that I would be okay. She even told me to tell my partner that she’s trusting him with me. She also kept reminding me to give, not just to receive. Very much like her character, a person who didn’t like to receive but was always giving. Even until the end, she thought of other people first before her.

When I finally opened up about her passing away, some friends reached out to me. Those who know her and those who haven’t met her at all mentioned one thing in common. When it’s about me and my Mom, they would all think about my lunchbox. She always prepared that for me almost every day. We call it “bekal” in Bahasa Indonesia. Sometimes I shared it with friends or colleagues, sometimes she made more so even more of them could taste it. Some people even had the usual pick-up line; “Mami masak bekal apa hari ini?”, which means asking the menu my Mom cooked for lunch that day.

She made my lunch because she didn’t want me to spend my money on it so that I could save it for something else instead. She said I could spend Rp20.000 — Rp40.000 a day, times 25 days of working, that’s a lot. Little did she knew that through the years the amount we spent on lunch could vary from Rp20.000 — Rp100.000 and that excludes the social dinings after office hours that we sometimes couldn’t refuse. So, yeah, even though I still ate outside once in a while, that’s the main reason why I could save a lot of money through the years, it was with her help.

This habit of making sure that her family was well-fed had grown more than just this little family circle. The swiss roll cake she made for my best friend a couple of times, the macaroni schotel we made for my partner, the whole feast she cooked in every Chinese New Year for all aunts, uncles, and cousins, and many more cakes and dishes that she made for other friends of families. Her love had reached further than she knew. People may not know her, but they know her through her cooking.

Sometimes I thought about writing down all of her recipes. I had that fear that if she’s gone, then all of those recipes would be gone as well, just like my grandma’s. My Dad told me that we could have started a Sundanese restaurant if we had her recipes. I think that stayed with me unconsciously. I didn’t want the same thing to happen to us. But we will never be prepared for anything like this, for the death of a loved one.

I had wished to record her recipes and tried cooking them myself. But I’m not as good as her. Well, I may not have the same cooking skill as hers, and having her recipes with me might be useless if I don’t know how to replicate them at all, but I hope I will always remember its taste. All of those ‘bekal’ she cooked with love for her family. All of those breakfasts, lunches, and dinners she cooked every single day.

I will miss her, most definitely, and I will never stop thinking about her for the rest of my life. I may have said goodbye to her before I left the house for the airport, but I never expected that it would be our last goodbye. It was my last chance to see her, to hug her.

I will never see you again, but I know you are here with me, Mami, with all the love you gave me in the past 32 years.

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