Hana Binte Othman, St. Andrew’s Junior College

My sister had to be reminded as she stood at the foot of Jaddi’s hospital bed. Tubes were being fed into my granduncle’s nostrils. The beeping of his heart rate monitor sliced through the room in short intervals. The cold and too clean of an environment in the minuscule room encompassing of white walls never felt inviting. Just desolate, as if taunting and reminding us all of what actions had led him there.

I was home then, asleep and unsuspecting that that night would be the last time I saw Jaddi or when he would take his final breath. The double digits of my age were a contradiction to how naive and oblivious I had been.

I was nine when the police parked their car at the parking lot of my block. Red and blue sirens and all. I was told to stay in the room while they took Jaddi away. My grandmother’s frown bunched together along with her wrinkles. She was crying. Lips tugged downwards and the brown in her eyes glossed from her hot tears. “He needs to go to the bathroom. Just let him go to the bathroom before you take him. Please," she was saying in Malay. I remember her being angry. “Go to sleep,” I tried fighting the anxious knot tightening in my chest and pushing away the waves of apprehension causing the turmoil inside of me. No one told me much.

Jaddi spent years in rehab for drug abuse.

When I saw him for the first time in years, it was like seeing the shell of him. His body changed dramatically. Gangly and exacerbated by the extra-large AC/DC shirts he always wore. His gargantuan glasses sitting on the sharpness that was his skinny face. You could have cut the tension in the room with a knife. I could not talk to him naturally after years apart. It was disconcerting how I used to know everything about him and then nothing much. But, this was my Jaddi. The same person who asked me to stand on his back when it was aching, who put a picture of my painting as his phone wallpaper, who never failed to send me “Relax! It’s the weekend!” pictures on WhatsApp weekly.

I rarely speak to my family about Jaddi. Whenever we do talk about him, it is to remind one another to pray for him as he lies, waiting in the grave for the afterlife. But as much as time can break your heart, it gives and mends too. My mother sat down with me and told me the things I ached to know years ago. Jaddi started taking drugs a long time ago, back in the 80s. He never showed signs because he made sure to take them without any of us around. No one saw him slur his words, lash out or act high out of his mind. Just his caring personality, banter with his older sister and lopsided smile while he smoked his cigarette, his familiar smell easy to detect. They tried talking him out of doing drugs. But the sinkhole always pulled him in again. Friends found him again. The temporary euphoria from a high stealing him away from us again. Again and again.

I did not cry when I first heard that he passed away. It did not register. But when I saw my family members carrying him, wrapped in white cloth, I felt the weight of the number of “I love you-s,” or “How was your day, Jaddi-s?” I did not manage to say. I felt the decades of years he missed living dawning on me and then being snatched away as he got carried away to be buried. I cried in front of everyone then, not even aware of the multitude of pats or hugs I had that morning.

Whenever my grandmother prays now, she prays for Jaddi too. I wonder how she actually feels, wonder if we had just tried a little harder, pushed him a little more, maybe the outcome could have been different. I wonder if I could have been more to make him want to stop. To make him change for us.

But Jaddi had his struggles too. Fighting on his own battlefield.

It’s true. He shouldn't have dealt with things that way. Now I try to remember what I can of him. Because beyond being a drug addict, he was my granduncle, the youngest of four siblings, a lover forced into a winless fight. “Jangan lupa untuk berdoa untuk Jaddi,” they said – Don’t forget to pray for Jaddi.