over the years, Mbah Gotho has lost 10 brothers and sisters, the 4 wife, and all his children.
although the grandchildren are still alive, they still have an insurmountable gap with the centenarians.
grandchildren can take care of his food and drink. He can take medicine for him and remember to help him celebrate his birthday every year. But his closest wife and daughters and brothers and hands were long gone.
no one can talk to him about what happened seventy or eighty years ago,
no one can talk to him again about a news, and
no one can make him feel young and full of life again.
now the distant history in our eyes is the life he once experienced personally. This gap has become the greatest source of his pain.
he became a breathing statue, a walking monument,
"since 1992, I have begun to die, even ready for the coffin and the tombstone for myself."