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Maybe writing about it, in this blog that no one reads, will make me feel better. Maybe it'll help. Maybe it won't. To record, is probably for the better. So that I always remember what the past was. Like I did that time.

They say double happiness is doing something, being something, achieving something so glorious that it not only makes you happy, but makes others- in the best case, the people you love- happy too. I say 'glorious' without any speck of sarcasm. I remember what that's like.

So is double sadness when you do something that makes you sad, and makes those you love sad? Or worse, when you can't do anything?

I never understood the depths to which my father loved my mother until this day.

Something is wrong with my mother. No one knows what. Three different doctors have examined, poked, prodded scanned and analyzed and they cannot determine what is truly and really wrong with her. She walks around in a depressed haze. Unable, unwilling, incapable, I don't know. She doesn't do much more than talk of how's she going to die. Die. Death. Of how much pain she's in, about how useless she is, about how useless and foolish and terrible we all are. About how she can't eat, can't walk, can't think, can't sleep. About how she is a walking corpse. About how we all might as well all die.

My father quit one of his two jobs to spend more time with her in an effort to make her happy. No one knows quite what is wrong with her. Reasoning, loving, caring, talking, or just sitting their with her... nothing seems to work. We've tried everything. And my father perseveres. Quitting one of his jobs, losing out on the money, making sacrifices here and there. Just to be with her, to spend time with her, to help her in whatever way he can. She is never appreciative. She rarely smiles or laughs. And yet he soldiers on.

My father is an ox. He was robbed of his childhood at a young age; working and tilling in the fields, walking and, when he was lucky, biking long distances to help support his family. He did the best he could in the limited schooling available, but even that ended with the dawn of Mao's Cultural Revolution.

He then was lucky. He came to Canada, land where a man who speaks no English can raise a family. Can somehow, if he puts his mind, his wits, his arms and legs and back and some unknown, unfathomable perseverance, support a family of four. Since arriving, he has worked tirelessly, cut corners, been the best provider he could be, to give us the best chance to succeed.

You know, I used to fault my father, my parents, for not presenting me with the opportunities that other parents have. Ridiculous, yes. I'm aware. I saw where others were, and in my jealousy, in my envy, thought that if only this, if only that, if only they had been better parents, then where would I be?

What a ridiculous, foolish attitude that was. I am no longer ashamed, but I do vividly understand know the ignorance of my youth. I only hope that that ignorance has been somewhat reduced, or at least stemmed.

My father works side-by-side with her. It has been a long time since my mother has last washed her hair. It is visibly unclean. It is not that we cannot afford the water or shampoo. It is that she simply does not want to. Does not want to wash her. That when my father, or I, beckon her to give her hair a wash, she rebuffs us with an utterance that we should just die. That she was on the inevitable and short road to dying anyways.

I don't understand. I try to, and I feel that maybe I'm more choking on straws than grasping at them.

Today we visited my grandmother. She is elderly, late eighties. My father and I had yesterday built a small bench for her to use to help herself out of the bathtub. Despite the railing that exists in her washroom that is meant to accomodate the elderly, she can no longer rise out of the tub.

When we arrived, we noticed the amount of dust, dirt, and debris littering her living space. My father and I set to vacuuming the apartment. As I vacuumed, pushing the head around the carpet, I looked at my grandmother's face, and then back to my father's. It is not an issue of not quite understanding the effects that age have taken on their faces, on their minds, although the latter is more obvious on my grandmother. No, such transitions are difficult to see in the people you see frequently. It was in comparing their faces, that I wondered what my grandfather was like.

I had never known him. He had died in the Communist rising back in China. He had been a very successful man, and so with the rise of the Communists, others urged him to flee to Hong Kong.

"I've never done anything wrong," he said then. "Ask anyone in the village."

He was soon murdered by the Communists.

He is rarely spoken of-- never by my grandmother, only a few times by my father. Pictures are never shown, and thus I must interpolate his face from where my father's and grandmother's diverge.

What was he like, I wonder. Would he be proud of the man that I am today? Would he be proud of the man my father is?

To the former: I hope so.

To the latter: fuck yes he would. Fucking yes he would.