Slathered With Saliva

The memory of meeting Grandma Linh for the first time will be engraved in my memory forever. I was only in high school at that time. Vietnamese Summers was scorching hot; at times Mom surrendered to the heat and took four showers a day. My hands swept the sweat off my forehead. The unbearable heat made my head start to beat with pain. Me and Mom went to meet Aunt Ca and Aunt Mai that day. We walked right in Aunt Ca's house, there were rarely doors for houses in the countryside. The house looked as if it were to be made from scraps. The walls had paint slowly peeling off, and the roof was made of reddish-brown rusted tin. Aunt Ca was there to greet and lead us to the room Grandma Linh stayed in. Aunt Ca explained to Mom that no one had enough time to take care of Grandma, and she had ended up with her.

I was looking around as Aunt Ca talked. The house barely had three main rooms, one tiny room I assumed was the bathroom, one bedroom and a living room. The living room didn't have much. There was a hammock next to the little box vintage tv, and a Buddha statue on a majestic-looking pedestal. The Buddha had smoke trailing off from the incenses around him. I gave a half-hearted prayer before following them to the bedroom.

"Mom... oh, mom..."

Aunt Mai was weeping while wiping Grandmas saliva from her hands gently with tissues. Grandma (Mom said on the way here) was in her nineties; she was sitting in her wheelchair with her legs curled up, concentrating deeply on chewing bread with her gums. Her arms holding the bread were as bare bones as you could get. Her bicep areas had skin sagging off, as if they were tiny droplets of water forming into one big droplet on the edge of drooping. She looked up at me and Mom. Her face was a resting mile-wide smile. It looked like a baby had just seen their mom after she picked them up from daycare. Her smile scrunched up her face and revealed many layers of dimples on her cheeks.

"Bread is her favorite food!" Aunt Ca hurriedly brought it up and quickly walked behind the wheelchair. "She'd spend hours trying to eat all that!"

The chance of lighting up the mood did not work on Mom. After a tense silence, she stooped down to the floor and started to sob. Her convulsive gasping, hiccups, and yells filled the room's atmosphere. Aunt Mai also fell, dropping to floor and sobbing, trying to suppress the gasps, letting one out as soon as she suppressed another one. I gently put the box of tissues on the floor next to them, and they had already begun to ravage the box, pulling tissue after tissue. Aunt Ca sat on the bed to continuously check on Grandma Linh, pulling her arms back whenever Grandma was getting close to swallowing the bread.

I had just stood there, staring at Mom first, then my eyes wandered to Grandma. Her hands had cuts and hard dry dead skin with veins looking like they would pop at any moment. More saliva had started to cover her hands, I quickly turned away and then to her face. Wrinkles all over, turning into each other. Her tiny cheekbones were standing out most, there were practically holes where her cheeks were supposed to be. I remember how I reacted; my face filled with disgust. Her huge grin with a thick batch of saliva dripping out of it only made me think there used to be something in that skull, something that worked tirelessly for so much of its life, only to end up like that. The heat was still unbearable, but my skin felt a cold and distant shiver like a part of my soul left and put dread in to replace it. I couldn't stand and look at what my grandma was, the terrible feeling kept eating away at for what felt like hours. I said I was feeling queasy and quietly left for my family to keep grieving.

I slowly closed the door when I left the room, making a little clink when it shut. I subconsciously walked from the hallway to the blinding lights of the Sun outside. It felt like something was moving for me, and not of my own will. A picture of the skeletal face Grandma had popped back up into my mind. Her body looked like the skin was slowly melting off her, the tissues disintegrating only having skeleton left.

My feet crumbled and I collapsed onto the dirt ground in the front porch. I had refused to go back into Aunt Ca's house, even if outside was blistering hot, even if I was sweating from head to toe. My legs crossed. "Will I be like her?" It was a terrifying question to young me. Even the thought of it was selfish, not worrying about my decrepit grandma but obsessing over my own well-being.

Will I fail at life? Will I find anything fulfilling with the time I have on here? Or will I be wasting years of life left? I curled up and bawled. I didn't want to lose who I was at that moment. I was going to age out of it. I was going to become an adult, then elderly, grow a bunch of wrinkles, get Alzheimer's and die. Aging felt impossible, I would stay late nights, waiting for something exciting to happen. Seven, eight, or nine decades didn't feel enough. I would've wished to be immortal to figure myself out. My gasps started to come out, I tried holding my breath until I was purple, but it was no use. I gave in and broke down. My body was sporadically shaking whenever my gasps came swooping back in. Looking at someone at death's door had made me start to dread the clock that would eventually catch us all.

Then a moped came closer and stopped. I jolted my head up to see Dad there. He was shouting over for me to come home. Mom would stay the night at Grandmas for the last time. I wiped my eyes slowly with my arm. Letting Dad know I was crying would only prompt him to say how weak I was. I struggled to put on my helmet and went on the moped. We started to drive in silence. It was pretty awkward; I had hugged him uncomfortably to not fall off. The road to get all the way here was incredibly narrow, it was the width of only me and Dad.

I glanced around, not trying to move my body around too much. The glimpses of rice paddies were almost mesmerizing. The simplicity of layers and layers of green reflected life here. People trying to just live day to day come here and gather food to eat. Something like that was rare back home. But was that life really fulfilling for me? Does living like that make one truly happy? The bread soaked with saliva, the teethless mouth, her skeletal face came back. Breathing in and out got heavier, my stomach feeling like it was free falling from The Empire State Building. I shut my eyes tight, hugged Dad tightly, and shoved my face into his back. I didn't care if he'd make fun of me. At that moment I hated Vietnam, it reminded me of the limited time on Earth. Gripping Dad tighter, a resolve came out of nowhere. I made a cringy cliche promise to myself that day. "Make the most out of the time you have left."

A red light, I slammed on the brakes on my small beetle-like car. My hands grasped the steering wheel tightly. Did I fulfill my promise? Did I do what I wanted to? I started to breathe heavily. If myself in high school or university could see where I was at, would they be happy with me right now? The bread slathered with saliva. Is questioning things even worth it, when that's the finish line? I slowly breathed in and out to keep my composure. Green light, I felt the brace like of a rollercoaster, I stepped on the pedal a little too hard. I can't be worrying about me right now; Mom is waiting for me in the hospice.