I came home early today to visit my family who I haven’t seen in a while.  My sister was over there too, her usual routine of picking up her kids from my parents’ place every weekday.  When I got home, I greeted everyone in their respective room and noticed my grandma already in bed.  I asked her what was wrong and whether she was sick to which she responded, I’m going to kill myself.  I laughed, inadvertently of course, and tried to cover it with a series of coughs.  I asked, what happened?  She said, I’ll tell you after you eat.  I closed the door and walked downstairs, wondering why I had to pick today.

I asked my sister:

“What’s wrong with grandma? Did something happen?”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. She said she was going to kill herself.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know!”

“I just saw her watching TV.”

“Can you talk to her? To see what’s wrong?”

My sister looked at me with tired eyes and gave a sigh, “I’m tired. I’m going home.”

I find this funny, and my sister’s response to it kind of shows our attitude and relationship toward our parents and grandparents.  Everyone’s dramatic and insane. My family is a sitcom in itself with everyone a caricature of him or herself.  My dad is insane and can talk for hours about circles and pi and how they relate to dollar bills. My grandma is deprived of attention and therefore always wants to die, hoping to get attention.  My mom is your typical subservient wife, and my grandpa your typical Asian parent.  And you have us, the kids, who have to put up with this.  But it’s not bad, really it’s not.  It’s interesting and fun and funny, and we usually laugh at everyone’s absurd nature.  And it helped me develop my sense of humor I have today.

I still don’t know what was wrong with my grandma.  When I came up after, she said she was fine and that there was nothing wrong.  She told me I should go home and get some rest since it was getting dark and cold.  And that’s what I did.