All This Grief, All This Love Being the eldest of five sisters meant Mia had learned early how to be the one who never complained. In Form 5, with SPM looming, her father collapsed at work. The ambulance took him to the hospital in Kota Bharu, and his job did not wait for him. Mak, who had never worked outside the house, began cooking nasi kerabu on the front porch before sunrise, her fingertips stained blue from the bunga telang. “Mia,” Mak said one night, counting coins on the floor mat. “Can you manage the girls?” “I can manage, Mak.” She always could. That was the trouble. After school she caught the bus to the hospital and sat beside Ayah’s bed with her Mathematics notes on her knees. Then she hurried home to the kitchen, where her sisters waited like a small, hungry parliament. Dalisha, fifteen, said almost nothing and braided everyone’s hair. Dalia, twelve, asked the questions nobody wanted. Dhiya, nine, counted everything: spoons, coins, days. Dinie, five, bargained over every vegetable. “Kak Mia, why does Ayah smell like medicine?” Dinie asked, chin on the table. “Because the medicine is helping him get better.” “Then why isn’t he better yet?” Mia had no answer, so she gave her an extra spoonful of rice. Her father was not an easy patient. Some days he was the man who had carried her on his shoulders through the pasar malam, who squeezed her hand and said, “My clever girl. You’ll make me proud.” The one who never fails to compliment her beauty each morning before heading to work. Other days the illness sharpened him into a stranger. “Your handwriting is a disgrace,” he snapped once, shoving away his tray. “You’re wasting everyone’s time.” Rice scattered across the floor. Mia knelt and picked it up grain by grain, saying nothing. She could not simply love him or simply resent him. Both lived in her at once, knotted like the raffia Mak used to tie the rice packets, and she was too tired to pick at it. After SPM, something loosened. The doctors sent him home, and for a few weeks the house felt almost light. Dinie laughed at dinner. Mak sat down and ate with everyone for once. Ayah drank his tea from the chipped blue cup, the one nobody else was allowed to use.
Maybe this is what it feels like to breathe out, Mia thought. Three days before the results, he died in his sleep. It happened on an ordinary Tuesday. Mia was at the sink when Aunt Normah walked in with her hand pressed over her mouth. “Mia,” her aunt whispered. “It’s your Ayah.” Mia was holding a plate. She set it down very carefully, as if the plate were the thing that might break. At the funeral, relatives pressed her shoulders and murmured the same sentence in a dozen voices. Be strong for your sisters. She nodded each time. Nobody asked what it cost. That night, at two in the morning, she stood in the dark kitchen with her phone in her hand. Her puffy eyes and sorrow gaze locked into his name. The screen lit her face. She watched it until it dimmed. Her thumb was moving before her brain caught up. Her whole life, whenever things fell apart, Ayah was the first person she called, even when he was the one who’d shouted. Now she needed to ask him how to survive this, and he was the only one who would have known. Someone who had been there for her, always, was no longer here. And somehow the world expected her to keep living. She had an entire lifetime ahead of her, and she would have to work it out without the person she had thought would always be there to help. “Kak Mia?” Dalia stood in the doorway, clutching her pillow. “Can’t sleep either?” Mia asked. “No.” Dalia climbed onto the stool. “Is it weird that I miss him? Even the shouting days?” Mia’s throat tightened. “Especially the shouting days, sometimes.” “Why?” “Because even those were him.” Dalia considered this with the gravity of a twelve-year-old. “Okay,” she said, and leaned against Mia’s arm. They stayed like that until the first call to prayer drifted over the rooftops.
In the morning, Mia set the table without thinking. Plates for Mak and the four girls, and then her hand reached for the blue cup and stopped in the air. Dhiya, counting, looked at the cup, then at the empty chair. She said nothing. She moved the cup to the shelf herself. “Some losses don’t happen only once. I lose him at the funeral, and again the morning I nearly set the blue cup on the table, and again in every moment he should have been there.” Mia murmured to herself. Outside, the world went on. Neighbours laughed over fences. A man on the bus grumbled about the heat. Mia wanted to turn around and ask how they could, whether nobody had told them. She hated them just a little, for moving through their days as if nothing had happened, as if her world was as fine as theirs. Perhaps that was one of the cruelest things about grief, the universe kept on spinning while yours crumbled into pieces. She watched her mother, too. Something in Mak had gone quiet, like a radio turned low in the next room. “Mak,” Mia said one afternoon, “do you want me to take over the porch stall tomorrow?” Her mother looked up, startled, and her face softened. “You’ve done enough, Mia. Let me carry something.” It was the smallest sentence. Mia had to look away so her mother wouldn’t see her teary eyes. That evening she found herself wrapping rice at the kitchen table, and her hands made one packet too many. Blue rice, a little dried fish, folded tight and tied with raffia. She held it for a long time. Then she set it on the shelf beside the blue cup, and she did not throw it away. On the morning the results were released, she sat on the porch steps with her sisters. Dalisha, who never said much, plaited Mia’s hair without being asked. Dalia held her hand. Dhiya counted the seconds under her breath. Dinie, who didn’t fully understand any of it, presented her with a half-eaten biscuit like a medal. Mia looked at the biscuit and began to cry, quietly, the way she had taught herself. “Kak Mia?” Dinie tilted her head. “Are you sad?” She nearly said I’m fine. The reflex was polished by use. “Yes,” she said instead. “I’m sad, sayang. And that’s okay.”
The porch did not collapse. Dalisha’s fingers only tightened in her hair. She had no words for it, not in Malay, not in English. Grief is untranslatable. It doesn’t obey the rules of grammar or the laws of time, and no language can hold a love that big. But she remembered what someone once said, grief is just love with nowhere to go. All of hers lived inside her ribs now, because he was gone and there was nowhere else for it to be. It was a cramping, aching kind of love, but she would rather have it trapped inside her than never have felt it at all. She thought of his handwriting remark, and the rice on the floor, and the warm squeeze of his hand in the pasar malam. The bad days were already blurring at the edges, while the good ones grew louder. She forgave him, not because the hurt hadn’t mattered, but because love turned out to be bigger than it. She took out her pen, and on the back of an old packet wrapper she wrote her name in the crooked, careless hand he had hated. She propped it against the blue cup, like a note left for someone coming home. Then she opened her phone. The results were waiting. She did not look at them yet. First, she opened a message to Ayah and began to type. Ayah, I did it. You must be proud of me. She breathed in, and pressed the screen.
AI REPORT