Pieces of we
Our story on CNBC - we had a pretty cool write up done about our journey since leaving Hong Kong, you can read that in a separate window by clicking the link in blue.
People ask how that came about and I honestly think if you are open to sharing your story, stuff like this always has a way of finding you. Everyone loves a good story, right?
August last year when I last typed up an update.
I think last time I wrote we had experienced an engine breakdown and we ended up parking our asses in an Airbnb in the mountains of Crete for about a month or so before we made the decision to have Jeroen return to flying and for the kids and I to return to my childhood home in India so we could save money for the boat repair while also achieving the task of Jeroen getting "current" again after nearly 2 years of not flying.
Jeroen managed to get a job with SAS Connect, a Swedish carrier, and after a month or so of training to get back in the fold, he was flying full-time for them, piloting the A320-Neo. It was his first time flying in Europe, a prospect he was genuinely happy to take on despite the diabolical pay for a Stockholm basing. The goal was always in priority as follows: (1) Get Current (2) Try to offset the cost of the engine being rebuilt (3) Save some money for the upcoming season if at all possible.
Well, we achieved all three, to varying degrees. He certainly got current, current enough to apply for other, better jobs, and to get his confidence back in his calling, even if it sometimes made him super pissed off to see how far the aviation industry standards had fallen since the dawn of the pandemic caused all airlines to hemorrhage cash and manpower across the board. I have heard the same question from almost every pilot friend we've known, "How long do they think they can keep treating us like this?" And by this we mean, like shit!
To see my husband, so capable, so smart, so highly trained and skilled...feel dejected, chewed up and spat out by an industry that expects excellence but somehow thinks that they can pay no more than a bus driver for working a job that can really impact your health, its madness. Still, we just dug deep and pushed forward. Jeroen went to work in Arlanda, Stockholm, Sweden and I took the kids with me to Coonoor, Tamil Nadu, India. We managed to last 4 whole months apart before I found the kids crying more often, missing their father, and me feeling progressively more overwhelmed with the day to day drudgery of single parenting two children without help from anyone. I mean, from morning to night I felt like I was either cooking, cleaning, washing dishes, teaching or wishing I had a stiff drink in my hand!
We had planned on being apart for 9 months, talking like we had it in us, but the reality of it was that even Jeroen was suffering from abject loneliness in his one room serviced apartment near the airport. Lets not forget that it was also winter in Sweden, and beautiful as it can be out there, its bloody cold! With temperatures outside reaching well below zero, its not like you have much of a chance to wander outside! After four months we made a solid plan for the kids and I to throw in the towel and just move to Sweden for the remainder of his planned time with SAS.
airport before then taking a Stockholm transit bus to Märsta Station and from there another bus into Märsta Center. It was a great opportunity for us to experience life in Scandinavia, and through the dead of winter as it headed into spring. Its a beautiful place, but that weather can leave you feeling pretty damn low. The positive take away from those months of living in Sweden was that as long as we were together, as a family, we were golden. It didn't matter that it was -6 degrees outside, it didn't matter that Jeroen was often tired from working sometimes six days in a row, it didn't matter that the kids were unable to do much more than just sitting on their iPads after a day of home education, it just was what it was, us making the most of our time together and rejoicing in our family united as it should be.
While I had four months in India with the kids we got into a
routine of daily home education and I wouldn't let the kids get onto screen time until 4pm each day. It was tough, let me tell you that much, but we managed to make it happen. We were always in bed by 9:30pm, and the next day we would start all over again.
We had stayed with my parents, not in their main house, in the apartment they had built for when or if us kids came to visit them. The three bedroom apartment was perfect for us to give my parents their space while also giving us our space. It worked out great because there was rarely ever a point where my parents felt we were a burden on them. I paid the bills for the utilities and I kept the place clean while also retaining my autonomy. Parents, regardless of how old you become, as their child, they will always treat you like a kid! I'm 46, I am not great at handling the belittling that can often be the forte of Asian parenting, and I don't always appreciate that being on full
display for my own children to witness. I love my parents, there is no doubt about that, and I respect them, I also think that the love and respect can and ought to be a two way street. I do what I can to model that for my children, so yeah, all of this is just to say that having a separate living space really saved my love and respect for my parents and kept that going, for the most part, on the rails.
At the end of our stay in India we took a trip to Singapore with my parents. My parents had just purchased an apartment in Singapore and this was an opportunity for the boys to finally meet their cousins, my brothers son and daughter, for the first time in their lives. Its nuts to think that my niece is fifteen and my nephew twelve...and that this was the first real opportunity for Sasha and Micah to meet them and get to know them. This is what life is like when you live in different countries. My brother and I grew up in Hong Kong. By the time our family
had moved to Hong Kong, my sister was already at University in Tokyo, so she never really experienced Hong Kong as anything other than a destination she came to for holidays. My brother and I, on the other hand, experienced Hong Kong as a place we called "home" for a good chunk of our lives, him until he graduated University and my parents moved to Singapore with him, and me for longer still, for the greater part of nearly three decades. When I put it that way it really is hard to believe I no longer see myself as returning to Hong Kong to live there. Of course, Jakob, our eldest son, is still there, completing his Master Degree in Education, I know he doesn't really feel ready to leave Hong Kong just yet. Jakob was born in Hong Kong and at twenty-four, he's lived his whole life there. I can imagine it is a very different experience than me moving there when I was thirteen or when my brother was nine.
For Sasha and Micah who were both born there, it will slowly be a
matter of which place they remember more. Most kids don't really remember what their lives were like before they turned four...we left Hong Kong when Sasha was nine and Micah was seven. Now they are nearly three years down that road. They remember living in Sicily (4 of the 7 months we were docked there in Marina Di Ragusa), they remember living in India (a total of 7 months as well, we spent about 3 months at the start of last year and then another 4 towards the end), they remember Crete and they remember living in Sweden. Where we end up next will, hopefully, be where they grow into their teenage years in relative stability, at least that is the hope. We know they have loved sailing but we also know they have missed out on opportunities to have extracurricular activities that many would have access to if they were in a traditional school environment. Oh, sure, they know how to sail, they learned how to ride a bike, they got really great at chatting with friends online, but its not the same as taking football lessons, violin lessons, joining a drama collective or learning how to swim competitively. I don't necessarily think those are things that will define them for a lifetime, but I certainly hope they can at least have the opportunity to do that while making friends in the process.
Our family had always lived very separate lives, much as we remained in contact and made attempts to stay close, the last time my brother and I had seen my sister was in March of 2022 when I was in India with the kids for a short spell. My brother had come to visit from Singapore, bringing a healthy dose of Covid-19 with him, my sister had come to have a short reunion with us for a weekend, she managed to avoid getting Covid-19 until she had another gathering with friends in Goa and got Covid-19 there. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that it had been nearly a year since I had seen my sister. I think my brother had seen my sister towards the end of 2022 when her and my brother-in-law had made it to Singapore on a work trip, they had stayed with my brother for two nights before they returned to India.
I remember waking up to a message from my nephew saying my sister had collapsed and had a heart attack, the message had been sent at 4:30am Swedish time, so when I woke around 7am I called him immediately, by that time my sister had already died. It didn't register for me, you know, in the way that something so shocking just gets said, you think they are gonna just pull out of it. She was gone, just like that...from one minute to the next, I was living in a completely different world, one in which my sister no longer drew breath, one in which she no longer laughed her contagious laughter, one in which she wasn't there to smother her two sons in her hugs and kisses. Death is so final, its messed up. Once the reality sunk in I immediately went about booking flights for myself and the kids. We had only just started planning to leave Sweden and here were were returning to India within hours of getting that fatal call. Jeroen had to work, there was no way around it, he was in his last month of work after having given his notice to SAS. There was no other option than to take the kids with me, and we've always had a rule: if its a wedding, a funeral or a medical emergency that we are needed for, we throw all concern about the cost of things and just go! In the years of having staff travel, the wedding/funeral/medical emergency of a family member, that was the one golden rule for paid-in-full tickets. The reason we came up with the rule was after I missed my grandmothers buddhist funeral rituals, because I tried to fly standby and I didn't manage to get on a flight!
My sister, Maya, was such a complex human being. She was so full of energy, she was always moving, always doing, always busy being there for others, for her sons, for her friends, for her underlings at Herbalife that was, for the most part of our memory of her, a very big part of her life. She didn't have much left for herself, I guess. There are so many complex feelings involved related to everything that exerted an influence in her life, it would take a lifetime to unpack it all and that is the place I am at, realizing that reality.
The kids and I hopped a flight within hours of the call from my nephew, Mario, my sisters oldest son. It took us 6 hours to fly to Dubai, another 3 hours on the ground and about another 3 hours on a flight from Dubai to Hyderabad. We landed, I had not slept a single hour, my cousin Nikhil was there at the airport to pick us up, my best friend Kavitha had come from Bangalore by plane, timing her arrival to coincide with me arriving from Sweden, so Nikhil was able to get all of us and take us straight to the house where my sisters body was being held, after being granted special permission from the Imam, for an extra day so her family could come for the funeral. My brother and my parents who had been in Singapore had flown in on the flight the night before, so we were all bleary eyed and in shock.
I am so grateful for my friend Kavitha, without whom I would have been lost in a sea of grieving strangers. Kavitha was there to take care of my mother, to hold my hand when I needed it, and to just be that sounding board for all the words that tumbled out of me when I was in need of being heard.
I am so grateful for my cousin, Nikhil, I don't know how we would have managed without him. Nikhil has seen his fathers funeral and for my family, at least for my brother and I, this was our first funeral, we didn't know what the hell to expect, how to behave, what to do, where we were needed and for what. It was doubly shocking because I had landed, driven from the airport with two tired kids, and went straight into funeral proceedings, and in this case, the confusion that comes with full on Islamic funeral rituals that involved bathing my sisters body before her being wrapped in sheets, bound and then carried off to a cemetery where women were not permitted to be on the grounds! It was a very traumatic experience that left us all lost for words. Even though my mother and I were part of the bathing ritual it was almost like we were sidelined, made to spectate without being acknowledged, while my sisters body was manhandled and rinsed by women who had never seen her naked in her lived life.
Japanese culture, we bath at onsen's naked, we have all seen each others naked bodies and have been comfortable to bath in the company of our family...what we witnessed at my sisters funeral was like an assault on our senses, it was like my sister had been robbed of her agency, we had been robbed of my sister, and everything we witnessed was like nothing we had ever witnessed before nor will we ever witness again. My personal feelings remain, that my mother was the first person to bathe my sister when she came into the world, my mother should have been the one to bathe her as she left this world, my mother was robbed off that one bit of loving kindness for my sister, her firstborn child. My parents had no idea my sister had converted to Islam, my brother and I assumed she had, at least on paper because her husband is Muslim, but none of us were prepared for what we witnessed for the greater part of three days. By Day 03 I couldn't take any more of it. We spent a lot of time just staring off into space and just mulling over everything we had witnessed, from the bathing to the sitting around in silence with all these other women with heads covered...My father, my cousin and my brother returned from the cemetery speechless. "You didn't miss anything, dude," my brother said, "it was just...I'm speechless...no words for how fucked up it was..." was all he could manage. My nephews came back from the cemetery covered in dirt and looking shell shocked. They had been made to descend into my sister's grave before being handed my sisters body to be laid in the grave, her two young sons...I couldn't even begin to imagine the trauma of the experience they endured.
My sister was buried surrounded by the stench of the patriarchy that had suffocated her in life. She was buried without her make up, without her perfume, without her beautiful jewellery, without a nice outfit...not even nail varnish! I was so grateful that she wasn't there to witness the shambolic madness of her funeral. We all left that experience with resolute ideas on how we want to go! My brother, my father, my mother, me, we all had very clear thoughts on how someone ought to see us out the door when its our time, because what happened to my sister, that was not what she would have ever wanted if she had a say in the matter.
It was a tough decision for us, as a family, as to whether to expose Sasha and Micah to "death" and the process of a funeral. Jeroen was hesitant, but for me it was a necessity that they see my sister. See her and know that their aunty, their Aunty Maya, she was gone. The sad thing is that they arrived at the funeral that was being held at her home, her body was in some sort of glass enclosed case, she was wrapped up like a mummy, bound with only her face partially visible, her skin was waxy and she had a heavy gauze bandage over her nose, so it wasn't like she even looked like anyone they knew. They were immediately whisked off to their cousin's bedroom so they could sleep because they had barely slept through the flights. They stayed in that room until the end of all the proceedings. Its actually crazy that they didn't realize who it was they bore witness to until well after the funeral was over and they had seen a familiar photo on the living room wall, a photo of my sister, brother, me and themselves that had been taken the last time she had come to Coonoor to spend time with us and we'd gone to the park where we'd had the photo taken.
It was only after seeing the photo that Sasha said, "wait...that's Aunty Maya??? I know Aunty Maya!" and it was like this weird disconnect because the 10 seconds they viewed her in the glass case was not enough for them to realize it was her. I will be honest, she didn't look like herself until after the bathing ritual where the warm water had somehow brought some of the colour back to her skin to where she looked more like she was sleeping than someone who had hastily been shrouded and brought from a hospital to be laid in a cooler case in her living room.
It took my mother fifteen days before she stopped having nightmares where my sister was undergoing the bathing ritual. When mum finally slept the first night without that nightmare she said she felt guilty, like she was forgetting and she didn't want to forget my sister. We all cried our tears in private. We have a generational trauma of being left to deal with our grief alone, so my parents too dealt with it alone. None of us knew how to really share in the grief other than when we were physically in the same space together, but at that point in time all we were experiencing was the first stages of grief: intense anger...disbelief and anger...a lot of anger.
It took me a month plus for me to actually find the time to unpack my grief. We stayed in India for about a week for the funeral and to get to spend even a few moments with my nephews, Mario & Xanan, before we returned to Sweden and to Jeroen. My sisters sons are 17 and 25, its too early to lose a mother, and its also hard to know how to comfort them because they have had to live with a lot of trauma in their household that led to my sister leaving this world way too soon.
I needed time to myself and it was also a necessity that I had to be out of the Shengen region because of my Japanese passport. Jeroen and the boys are all EU members, I don't belong to the club. No matter how we look at it, with us not registering as residents anywhere in the EU, including choosing not to register in Sweden, I was having to stick to the rules of 90 days out of 180. My choice to return to Hong Kong and then to spend a month in Hokkaido was initially just about the Shengen shuffle, but once Maya died it became a necessary pilgrimage to be able to process my grief as I have always had to process big emotions, alone.
I spent a week in Hong Kong, reunited with Jakob after nearly two years apart. It was good to see him, I had missed him. We have all missed him. He's grown into a "man"
Hong Kong was wonderful, I had a chance to revisit with many of my old friends whom I hadn't seen since I left exactly two years prior when I closed the restaurant. From Hong Kong I flew to Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan. I hadn't been back to Hokkaido in nearly 4 years. I had missed it so much, words cannot describe how much I had missed being back there. It was also pleasant that all the restrictions on Covid testing had just been dropped so it was like returning to Japan and to a time when everything was normal again.
Friends of ours, Chris & Mel, have a house in Niseko, not far from where we used to have our own house up there before we sold our share in it back to the partners we owned the house with. Chris & Mel were so kind as to grant me a chance to take up residence in the house for the duration of a month, just putting in enough to cover utilities. I rented a car for a month too, a clunker that possibly didn't come with insurance papers, but no one needs to know that *cough* you pay peanuts, get monkeys, as my dad always says, and I got a dinged up Subaru for two weeks and then some other dinged up small black vehicle that did amazing on gas in comparison to the Subaru that seemed to guzzle petrol like a monster! Still, I had the perfect time and space to be alone with myself in the middle of the woods as the seasons shifted from winter into spring. A month alone, with no friends, no distractions, no real travel plans...just me, myself and I...in a wood cabin in Niseko. I think I spent the first week being overcome with tears from time to time. Awash with guilt for not having been there for Maya...and then with a mix of a million emotions as I came to terms with the very complex relationship I had with my sister for as long as she has been a part of my life. By the second week I was able to spend every day in silence and just sit with my emotions. I didn't read any books, I didn't watch TV, I didn't do much more than just eat meals I put together for myself to eat alone...
I went to the sea to lay stones as a memorial for my sister, to put my emotions into them and leave them there by the sea. I picked up smaller, weather worn stones, put my prayers and my sadness into them...and then I threw them into the sea. I feel like the month I spent in Japan gave me the space to just sit with the loss of my sister, with the complex emotions of laying to rest the good and the bad, and to forgive myself for not having been there for her in the capacity she likely needed or wanted. By the time my sister died I hadn't spoken to her in nearly 8 months, things hadn't been great between us despite all our efforts, we'd always had this up and down relationship where things would always circle back around and we'd return to being in each others orbit...I guess this time we didn't get that chance to circle back around. Its not until after she died that I had a chance to piece together the fragments of everything she went through in those last months that I missed, from friends, family and those who were with her at the very end. My sister was suffering, she tried to get out of the constraints of everything holding her back in her life, but in the end they simply were too much for her to break free of. Much of the anger my family has had to juggle with has been in resolving not to say or do anything we will regret during the time we were together at the funeral. We each know we want to be there for my nephews, and that is the extent of it. My nephews are the only part that remains of my sister, a testament to her life and they are wonderful kids. Xanan is quiet and resilient, I have no doubt this loss has been hard on him and yet I know he will thrive once he gets out of that house and begins his university life in Toronto, Canada. Mario is already on his own journey as an adult, working for a US based company while also pursuing his dreams of being a chef in his spare time. My parents just went to visit Hyderabad last week to see Xanan graduate high school. My father had promised my sister that he'd come for the graduation, so he ensured that him and my mother were there for it. I know Xanan was happy to see them.
By the time I made it to the final days of my month in Hokkaido I was well and ready to return to life, to civilization, to being around people! It had been like the longest solitary retreat ever, a luxury for most people, and certainly for me, the last time I had time to myself like that was when I did 12 days on the Camino a year prior. Anyway, from Hokkaido I flew back in to Hong Kong to stay with my friends who had just tested positive for Covid-19! So I had to keep my distance from them and stay in my rooftop enclave above their apartment, it all worked out great, I still managed to spend time with them the final two days because they were testing negative by then. I left for Istanbul after four solid days in Hong Kong, having had a chance to spend more time with Jakob again. I stayed in Istanbul two nights which gave me enough time to explore the Hagia Sophia and The Blue Mosque. Beautiful and now one more site to cross off my bucket list! From Istanbul I flew to Bodrum and from there I took a cab to Marmaris where I finally reunited with Jeroen and the boys who had sailed Kokoro from Agios Nikolaus to Rhodos and then to Marmaris with the help of my father-in-law, Erik, along for the journey. Erik took the same cab to the airport that shuttled me back to Marmaris, so unfortunately I did not get a chance to see him in person.
So now we have been in Marmaris for a while, initially in the marina which was charging a whopping 150 Euro a night, and now we are bobbing about in an anchorage where the nights are filled with loud music carried over the water and the days are broken up with the Muezzin's call to prayer. We have not restarted home school because I returned to the boat and within a day or two I got the flu, bad! No, it wasn't Covid-19, I know because I made Jeroen go get me two tests! On two separate days of running a fever, coughing almost until I pee my pants, and suffering a sore throat that made me feel like I had swallowed razor blades...negative results! Damn, did I feel like dog turds! I think it was just the month of solitude and then all those people, planes and jetlag! It took me nearly 10 days to recover, on Day 4 I caved, went to the doctors and asked for antibiotics, and wouldn't you know it, they gave me the weakest possible antibiotics that took all of the seven day cycle to cure me! And just as I began to get better, Jeroen and Sasha got sick with what I had brought to the boat with me from my six weeks away! They are still barking coughs, snotty as hell and sleeping like crap! Micah is the only one who hasn't gotten sick and he's always the one who maintains a sturdy constitution through just about anything! So for now, we are taking it easy as everyone gets back to some semblance of normal. Micah had a birthday two days ago, he turned 10! We went for a nice meal, a movie and he got to play on his video games all day, it was a legit decent birthday as they go.
All I can say is...I am glad we are back together, in sickness and in health, its good to be together. I think the feature on CNBC came out and it was a reminder of why we are doing what we are doing but also how special it all is. We are waiting to hear on a future job prospect being confirmed so we know where we will end up at the end of the season. I don't want to say a whole lot about it just yet because nothing is firm just yet, but as soon as we have a green light, we will be happy to share that news with one and all.
I spoke to Jakob, I think he felt a bit left out because there was no mention of him in the story about "the family" and I told him I understood how he felt, that it was Okay to not feel Okay...but that its just one story in a series of stories, that he had been mentioned in the previous article that had been written about us amongst a collective of families who left Hong Kong. The story wasn't about "what happened to Lisa's family" it was about how one family turned job loss into a chance to buy a boat and set sail. I think Jakob understands it now, but yes, I can see how he could feel alienated by the story not mentioning him as part of the family. He's 24, a young man, living his own story in Hong Kong, that is worthy of a whole other write up, isn't it? :)
So for now I sign off, having spent the greater part of a few hours writing my little heart out. I hope you've enjoyed this update. I know there is a lot of heavy material included but I have tried to be as sparing with my words as I could be on the matter. I hope to continue to share our journey with you in the months and years to come. Thanks go to every one who has reached out to me to share that they enjoy my writing, as I have said to you, I never think anyone reads my work, I write as a form of catharsis and if in some manner it also proves to be enjoyable reading, hey, two birds with one stone.
I remember my cousin Nikhil's dad, my Uncle Rex, he was such a huge supporter of my writing, back when I was in my 20's and used to have a blog. He was a writer too, and him saying I was a gifted writer really meant the world to me because I really looked up to him. I miss him, I know Nikhil, Nathasha and Nadia also miss their Dad. I think death is such a unique event to encounter and each person who experiences it becomes a part of a collective that shares in the sea of grief that exists between souls. Each individual experiences grief in a purely subjective manner, the awareness that is birthed is very much based on the individuals own reflections. I am amazed I made it this far in life without truly knowing the pain of losing someone close to me, I would not wish this awareness on anyone, but I can say it opened my eyes to what lies beyond the curtain. My sister meant many things to me, both good and bad, sibling relationships are complex and layered with history of memories that are woven into the fabric of human existence and perception of the world around us.
I've always known that time is precious. I have always known that life is finite, that our individual time on this planet is but a flash in the pan, a single grain of sand in an hourglass...but Maya's death and her not being here any more has really cemented that awareness that nothing can be taken for granted, not even the time you have here today. Don't leave till tomorrow things you can do today. Don't save your fine China for a special occasion, use it now even if its with your dishwater tea! Don't promise your folks you will call and then forget, they won't be here to wipe up your tears of regret when they are gone. Don't work so hard you don't have time for your kids when they need you, one day they will be grown and they won't need you as much any more. Don't take your health for granted, by the time you figure things aren't going right it will be too fuckin late. Live life for yourself, all the great shit you do for others won't matter a damn thing if you don't take care of yourself and the things that make you happy. You don't always have time to fix the things you want to...the relationships, the hurt, the bridges you burned, so fix them or accept that they will remain as they are, just be honest with yourself one way or the other. One day, all of your life won't even be a memory to you, all you leave are the memories of you to the people who mattered in your life, so make those memories count. Be good to the people who love you, be kind, be open, be honest, don't be afraid to be vulnerable...because in the end, that is what life is about, being unafraid to be who you are and to be unashamed that you lived your life as your authentic self, an open book that told a damn good story of a life lived to the fullest.
Its hard to come to terms with Maya being gone. It was always Maya, Sian and Me. It was always the three of us. I was the middle child. I was someone with a big sister and a little brother. Its hard for me to think Sian and me are it now. My father has had to bury a mother, a father, three brothers, a sister, a nephew, a niece...and now a daughter. My father is 78 this year...he's experienced death so many times over and I know my sister's death has been hard on him despite his stoicism, I am glad he has Mum and she has him. My brother and I lean on each other, but my brother deals with grief in a whole different manner than I do. He deals with it by just putting it in a box, packing it into his subconscious and then focusing on work. I am not my brother...I deal with my emotions with my words, words create reality, by shedding light on my emotions I make them easier for me to manage and to share the burden of them with others who can relate and hopefully in doing so, I can help even more people understand how to have empathy for someone who is experiencing what I have experienced. Life is such an incredible experience to participate in and its so important to do so with mindfulness...present to the good and the bad. If I learned anything from Maya's passing, its that I owe it to myself, to my kids, to my husband and to my loved ones...to be present to all of it, to commit to life with all my being.
Thank you for sharing in just one little chapter of my story.
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