The Quiet Harbour

My paternal grandmother arrived with a small suitcase. She had come from Ipoh to stay with us for the week — something she had never done before in all my years of growing up. My father had just lost his young son. And this, it turned out, was how Opah Chun said the things she did not have words for.

We called her Opah Chun. A tall Malay woman with grey hair pulled into a small, neat bun, she wore the tinted spectacles favoured by Malay women of her generation and moved through the world with a quiet that was not emptiness but something more considered than that. I used to wonder, as a child, what she made of everything around her. She observed a great deal and said very little — which, I have come to understand, is its own kind of wisdom.

She had twelve children — though her eldest son had passed away years before, lost to floodwaters while trying to rescue a stranger. Each of the remaining eleven had on average three children of their own. During Eid, her single-storey bungalow in Ipoh expanded somehow to contain all of them. I remember finding her always in the kitchen in those gatherings, a steady and unhurried presence among her daughters, producing extraordinary quantities of food without apparent effort or complaint.

Her days ran on the same quiet clock wherever she was: up before dawn to sweep the floors and clear the garden of overnight leaves, then breakfast for my grandfather and the household, then the long work of lunch, and then — her one daily indulgence — an afternoon siesta with her sister and nieces in the women’s room. They would lie in their sarongs in the searing noon heat. These were hefty, magnificent women who rested with the same authority with which they cooked and cleaned and kept everything running. Opah Chun was the quiet engine of that household — never at the front of anything, but nothing working properly without her.

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And so she came, with her little suitcase, and made herself a place in the middle of our living room on a floor mattress surrounded by pillows. She did not take a bedroom. She did not position herself at the edge of things. She settled in the centre of the house, which I understand now was not accidental. She was placing herself where she could be felt.

She did not make grand gestures. There were no tearful embraces, no long speeches about time healing wounds or God’s plan or the importance of being strong. She simply continued being Opah Chun — doing her prayers at the appointed hours, reading the Quran, moving quietly to the kitchen, sitting with my stepmother Ummi in the soft conversations that women have when they are tending to something that cannot be fixed. She was simply, entirely, there.

I watched my father in those days. I watched him register her presence the way you register warmth when you have been cold — not with exclamation, but with something in the body settling. He did not need her to speak. She did not need to. Her being there said: I am your mother. I am not afraid of this. I will not leave.

Amidst the waves of our grief — each one arriving just as the last was receding — there she was. Quiet. Steady. A harbour in the middle of the storm.

When I first saw her set down her luggage, I thought: how very thoughtful of her. A long journey from Ipoh to Kuala Lumpur, at her age, in her quiet way. It struck me as a kind gesture. I did not yet understand the scale of what she was giving us.

Grief comes in waves — this much I knew even then, though I did not yet have the language for it. One wave would recede, leaving you momentarily upright, almost functional, almost like yourself, and then another would come and take the ground out from under you again. In those days, the waves were relentless. And in the middle of all of it, there was Opah Chun, doing her prayers, setting out her meals, moving without hurry through our wreckage — not pretending it was not there, but also not drowning in it. A soothing, unshakeable presence. A harbour.

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Opah Chun taught me, without a single lesson, one of the most important things I carry into my practice: that the most powerful thing you can do for a grieving person is often simply to stay. Not to fix. Not to explain. Not to fill the silence with reassurances that are meant to comfort you as much as them. Just to be present — persistently, unhurriedly, without flinching — in the middle of something you cannot make better.

That is what holding space actually means — not a technique learned in a workshop, but a choice to remain, over and over, in the face of something you cannot fix. A body in the room that says, without words: I am not afraid of your pain. I am not going anywhere. You do not have to be alone.

I think of Opah Chun often. In her tinted spectacles, in her neat grey bun, in her floor mattress in the middle of our living room. A quiet woman who had carried more than her share of loss in her own life — her eldest son taken by floodwater, a lifetime of service and relative silence — and who, when her own child needed her most, packed a small suitcase and came.

No fanfare. No words. Just her suitcase, her prayer mat, and a week of steady, loving presence.

She never told me how to hold space for grief. She simply showed me — one quiet day at a time.

— Nina
Psychotherapist  ·  Workplace Wellbeing Consultant  ·  Kopi with Nina