Q

Each year i visit and am a little different.

One year i sulked the whole time, because it was too early for the heat and crowd; another i was distracted – we were going for our family favorite prawn mee after; once i came a teenage christian, and couldn’t reconcile the joss sticks in my hands with the church’s checklist if forbiddens.

Each year you remain exactly the same. We wipe the dust off your smile, as wide as it was the last time we’ve seen you. I try to picture you older: deepened the lines along your eyes and diluted the bold grin with stress of an imagined middle age. I think of my fantasy cousins.

Everyone else aged with some guilt: your mother; your brother and sisters. They remember, as kids, racing each other from the playground back home. You tripped and fell but they ran on in a heady cloud of sand, dusk and morbid glee. Later they would each get a rap on the knuckles for leaving you behind.

Soon, i will be your age when you left us, and then – in an uncomfortable warp of natural time – older. In my life you were a guest star. You arriving late at my 2nd birthday party, that familiar helmet tucked under your arm, you holding my toy dog hostage until i traded cream cake for it, you spinning me overhead against shrieks of protests, the air expanding in my heart and lungs and head to a giddying burst.

Was that how it was for you in those last seconds? In the newspapers, before my mother hastily stashed them away from the family, you were a grainy monochrome – more stationary than I’ve ever seen you – meters away from your upturned bike. Those days I tried to capture the exact moment you were swung off the torque of your spinning motorbike. How sudden it was, what and who you were thinking of.

The grieving I was kept away from, and reconstructed only from quiet recounts from my mother. At your funeral us children played outside, strategically preoccupied with yellow toy steel cars. I remember being too young to understand the finality of death, but the macabre excitement and curiosity of something usually forbidden bloomed in me a childish fascination. My own grief came much later, and gradually, from noting your absence where you should have been.

In those days a sombre hush fell over our us; a clenching, clammy inability to see life unfolding in its usual way. It took years and change for us to ease ourselves back to almost normal.

Now every year we come back to your perpetually youthful grin, ourselves a mix of guilt and relief. It is possible, I now realize, to get over a loved one’s death. Whether we want to is a different matter altogether.