Grandparents

When I was young, I was taken care of by my grandparents as my parents had to work and they could not leave a five year old kid alone at home alone to take care of his meals and other daily routines. I schooled in a kindergarten near my grandparents flat, and I stayed at my grandparents’ home for five days a week, only returning home during the weekends for convenience sake. I did not enjoy those days as a young child needed the care and attention of his parents, and seeing my brother getting to spend the whole week with my parents while I could only see them for the weekends inevitably made me jealous. Hence, I began to dislike living with my grandparents and this in turn led to me disliking my grandparents. However, as I am sitting here typing out this blog post, I realized that those were one of the happiest times of my life.

People nowadays get so caught up with their lives that they forget about the old folks that painstakingly raised them up since they were young. During a visit to an old folks’ home, I found our the sad truth that there are many people in Singapore who, once getting a family and having a stable income, forsake their parents as they view them as a burden, and thus dump them in an old folks’ home. Some of the better ones would still come to visit them once a week, while some are so rotten that once the put their parents in an old folks’ home, they would never visit again, not even once in ten years.

My grandfather used to tell me a story, about a son, a father and a grandfather. The grandfather was very old, thus one day the father made a cart and together with his son, placed the grandfather on top and pushed him up a mountain. Once they reached the peak, the father left the grandfather and the cart and walked away. The son immediately retrieved the cart and started pushing the cart down the mountain. The father asked, ‘The cart is so heavy, who do you want to waste your energy and push it down the mountain? Just leave it here.’ The son replied,’ Well, next time when you are old and useless, I do not have to go through the trouble of making a new cart to dump you onto the mountain.” The father, upon hearing this, realized his mistake and brought the grandfather back down the mountain.

I feel that although our parents or grandparents might be old and useless, we still have the moral obligation to take care of them. They have raised us up to be what we are today, and their only request is for us to take care of them until they pass away. If we cannot even fulfill their final wish, then how can we consider ourselves to be their son or daughter? During the days where I lived with my grandparents, I have learned a lot from them, such as speaking their dialects and learning life skills and moral values. Thus, we should treasure the days that we can spend with them, and not wait until they are gone before we realize their importance in our lives.