quiet notes

Make a list

noreply@blogger.com (wheyface) — Thu, 24 Oct 2019 01:17:00 +0000

Make a list of the good things encountered yesterday,
and start to feel better.

A post-it note from a student passed on to me
like a love letter from a secret admirer

One of the activities:
Draw this image in 'Ars Poetica':
'For love
leaning grasses and two stars above the sea'
One of the boys made it into a space invasion scene,
which made me laugh.
Another boy made the grasses look like shark teeth,
how very wrong for the poem, but
a good tonic for me, sorry, Archibald MacLeish.

A quiet student at the back drew a moon and a star.
I had never considered that before,
so good to be taught something
when I was being paid to teach.

My drawing was of a steep slope that led to deep sea,
Two distant stars.
The grasses, a chaos of weeds.

Another favourite phrase: 'the night-entangled tree'
I asked them to imagine
horribly tangled hair, or a mess so bad that you might say to your friends:
'I am entangled! And then you lose your friends
because no one talks like that in real life.'

The laughter of young people is a very good thing
especially between 3 and 5 pm (they start school at 7 am),
when they could be home or playing soccer
but there they were with me at 'How to spend time with a poem.'

Playing a video clip of Auden's poem 'Funeral Blues'
and hearing the hush in the room of these 15-year-olds.
Their teacher telling me earlier on how much she likes 'Here Comes The Sun':
I needed to be reminded, especially yesterday,
that a gift from God years ago continues to be a gift,
I had forgotten and needed to be reminded;
such things should never be taken for granted.

Playing a clip of Cyril Wong reading
Telling the students this is a dear friend
my favourite Singapore poet
who deserves to be watched in person
I said, and also, he is very very very very naughty.
This much was clear from the second poem in the clip.
I read aloud his poem about his mother's steps to sanity.
If this poem were a colour, what would it be?
A student said grey, which was how I felt it to be too.
But grey not as a mist but as the cutting and healing that
only poetry can make
at the same time.

[After the class I was on the train
when a student from another context
sent me a photo of something her teacher had written
about 'Innocence', also a gift story,
where a Maths teacher, thoroughly fictitious,
appeared in my handwritten draft,
a voice of someone who had been abandoned,
so innocent, so muddled, so clear-headed and unbitter.]

(Image: kxngyuu]

Mum, Mah Mah, Ah Zor

noreply@blogger.com (wheyface) — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 16:02:00 +0000

According to my mum, I was a fussy baby. Being the first grandchild on her side of the family, the first baby to land in the household of fiery, straight-talking Changs, I was certainly fussed over.

My great-grandmother and grandmother: the two women from whom I learnt the mysterious love of kin. They adored me, asking for nothing in return. It was my mother who suffered the weight of expectations.

Here I am probably three years old, leaning on mum's back as she washed clothes in the side yard of the house on Meyer Road she had married into. She hated household chores, something I have inherited from her. She told me and my brothers that we must never step over books. She wasn’t much of a reader and yet she chose to name me after a heroine in a Taiwanese romance novel.

She said that she dreamt of a baby with a thick mop of hair before giving birth to me. It was a baby in a poster she used to stare at. I don’t think my hair is thick, but that image of my mother, whom I got to know as someone who had been rudely awakened from dreamland, is one that I like very much.

She is a tough mother, as tough as she is tender and unschooled in the ways of the world. Just two days ago we bickered during a Grab car ride home. The driver would have heard us. Telling each other off and then grudgingly making up, each giving way to the other using the most indirect words and furtive gestures of mother-daughter love. I am blessed by the incomprehensible love, oftentimes spiky, sometimes as soft as petals, of these fierce Chang women.

[The above is an edited version of a post on Instagram.]

Dear Boon

noreply@blogger.com (wheyface) — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 00:37:00 +0000

[At Clarke Quay with Boon and his friends on his birthday on 11.11.11]

Once again October has arrived, and this year, like the past seven years, I had thought of going away as if being away from Singapore would make a difference.

October 15, 2012, was when you died. Last Sunday I returned to our coffeeshop for yong tau foo. It wasn't a planned visit. Y and I were at church in the morning. It is customary for us to have brunch after service. My plan for Sunday was to attend a T.R.E. class with Y in the afternoon (an exercise we jokingly called 'non-yoga', a new-age thing that she would be wary of experiencing on her own, which was partly why I said okay when she'd asked me a few weeks ago). After the class I would have early dinner before heading over to my uncle's wake. I'd learnt on Sunday morning that he had passed away in the night. Yong tau foo at Tiong Bahru wasn't part of my plan for Sunday at all. Yet as we walked out of ARPC, it was what came to mind.

The bus stop across from ARPC was where we would take the bus. The bus app said that the bus would come in 7 minutes. Next to the bus stop was a house with orchids for sale. We went inside through the side gate over a drain, and walked down shady rows, hemmed in on both sides by hanging orchids and orchids on racks. I told Y that I love especially the green and white ones. I had forgotten, but it comes back to me now. I'd bought orchids after you died. In the weekends after your funeral I'd returned to Mandai and after visiting your niche I would go to a nursery. The first time there was a worker who'd asked me if he could help me.

'My boyfriend is dead,' I had said. 'He died recently.'

'Very sad,' the worker had said.

Why had I told him? I look back now and see that I was an unravelled thing.

At Tiong Bahru I asked Y about her yong tau foo order. What size would she like?

'$4,' she said.

'Their prices have gone up,' I replied. 'No more $4.'

She'd been re-reading this blog recently and she had remembered a previous post where I'd written about me being $4 and you being $5 to the uncle who took our kopi and teh orders.

That mention of $4 should have reminded me of you. You came to my mind briefly, a flutter of wings by a passing nondescript insect. I confess: my thoughts were on someone else. He calls himself a carpenter when he's that and many other things. I think you would have gotten on.

Y and I laughed and chatted about lots of things as we ate. We didn't talk about you or about the man on my mind. She understood that I needed to be distracted, as well as I understood her need for distraction. This is how blessed we are, she and I. How God has given us each other, given us our bond and our channel of nonsense, salty silent tears, our continuing chatter about James, our practical stoic natures.

There was hanging TV screen across from our table. From time to time I looked at it. An image of three men in a row came on. It'd been filmed in the coffee shop. They had bowls of yong tau foo in front of them. I watched and then it hit me. It was you. The one on the left. He had your body shape, your receding hairline, your forehead. The bright green tee he wore -- you had a tee in that colour.

It wasn't you. It was an actor in a commercial. But it was uncanny, how much he resembled you in the way he threw his head back to laugh. His shoulders had that tautness about them, sturdy shoulders with tension and strength in them. The way he leaned forward. It was you.

'Doesn't he look like Boon?' I said to Yvonne. 'The guy in green.'

She studied the screen. 'Not really,' she said. 'That guy is fat.'

'He really looks like him,' I insisted.

We watched the TV for a few minutes in silence.

'He looks so happy,' I said.

'Yah.'

Later on when we were on a bus to Orchard, I told her that she had just taken part in a remembrance exercise with me. I can't remember what she said, but both of us were smiling and thinking of you that day.

***

At my uncle's wake I saw my uncle in his casket. He looked peaceful, more peaceful than when last Thursday when I'd seen him at NUH.

I hugged my aunt, my strong aunt who looked like a piece of paper. Then I sat down with my cousin whom I'd not spoken to in years. We talked about her father. I told her how something I'd never told anyone else before. When I was little I'd wished he was my dad.

She was very surprised.

'I'm sorry I didn't visit him earlier.'

'He would have known. He wouldn't have minded,' she said.

And Boon, you know why I'm telling you this, right? Because that's the thing we'd forgotten when were together. There were things we'd let slip because we were wound up in our individual mortal mental coils, and we forgot that we are persons who need to step out of ourselves for the persons around us who need us.

'I will miss him. But I'm so glad we got to say everything we needed to say to him,' Sharon said.

That's something I learnt when you died. And this is why I wrote today.

Wei x

The Visible

noreply@blogger.com (wheyface) — Fri, 12 Jul 2013 10:02:00 +0000

I see this church every morning on my way to work. I recently learnt that it is the oldest Roman Catholic church in Singapore. The columns have supports, like someone old and frail who needs props to help him or her stand up. The paint is faded. There are noble aged trees in the compound. All these things draw me to this church, but the supports were what I noticed first when I started to use this route. Every morning, for some reason, my fixation with these crutches persists and I stare at them as I walk past.

One day, after I had my lunch, I went inside the church and sat down at one of the pews. There were not many people there. Most of them looked like retirees. A handful were office workers; they wore neat office attire and brightly-coloured lanyards around their necks. I gazed at the long stems of the ceiling fans, the figure of Jesus on the cross. Two church workers were preparing the altar for the lunchtime mass.

Bells tolled. It was one o’clock. The service was at one thirty. I did not stay for mass.

This morning I had a thought. I am like this church with its aged, propped-up columns, its bandaged facade. I am run down in many ways and like this church, my run-downness is naked, on display.

Inside the church the lunchtime mass goes on every day no matter how small the attendance. Inside me, the Holy Spirit dwells, nourishing my soul, so that:

even when I am not happy, I am joyous;

even when I am hungry, my stomach is already filled;

even though I am on crutches, I walk and I run.

I hope that I have not let Him down. In the entries of these three weeks, this is what I have been trying to do.

The Invisible (III)

noreply@blogger.com (wheyface) — Thu, 11 Jul 2013 10:56:00 +0000

What were the signs?

This happened a few times in the three days between Boon’s death and cremation. On the screen of the mobile I could see that there was a new text message. But when I tapped on the text messages icon, there was no new message to be seen. Was he trying to send me a message?

On one of those evenings, also between the day of his death and cremation, I was going through the photo library on my laptop. I was looking at a photograph of Boon when the application hung. The picture was taken at a coffeeshop where we used to eat kaya toast and mee pok. He wore a baseball cap and the grin on his face was very cheeky. I wrote in my journal that day: “You are worried that I will forget you? Don’t worry, my dear. I won’t.”

On the day after the cremation, I woke up and made a mental list of the things I had to do. There were a lot of things to sort out: financial and legal matters; the matters at his workplace. I had run out of black clothes, so I put the laundry into the washing machine first thing in the morning. And at the back of my mind the whole morning was the reminder-to-self to hang the clothes out to dry before going out.

As usual, I crammed far too many things to do in the few hours of a morning and I had to rush to shower to get ready to go out. When I stepped out of the shower, I saw that the door of the washing machine was open. This had never happened before.

There was something on the floor beneath the opened door. It was the black checkered top that I wore to the cremation. Boon liked it especially. In fact I did not use to wear it very often until after he saw me in it once and said that I looked good in it. I wore it to the cremation for this reason. And there it was on the floor. I picked it up.

“You’re still here,” I said aloud. I hung the blouse and all the other clothes. I was smiling because when I returned to the flat after the cremation, when I walked inside, I felt like a swimmer in a sea that had suddenly lost its current. The air seemed vacant. And the emptiness made me dejected. I felt abandoned.

“It takes time for the departed to leave. It’s like shutting down a computer,” said the priest, “You have to close all the different windows, one by one, and then you can shut down the system.”

I was sitting in Father Yin's office at the church. I had gone to see him because I wanted to hear from him his account of what happened when he went to the ICU to pray with Boon on October 12. Before that afternoon, Boon had not moved for close to two days. Whilst the priest was praying for him, holding his hand, Boon moved his head from side to side.

The priest told me what he could remember from that day. “I saw him and I could tell that it was not good. So I held his hand and I prayed for him. I prayed for repentance and for forgiveness. I prayed for him to have peace of mind.”

When the priest asked me why I needed to know all this, I said I was planning to write about the whole experience. I had seen some things. There had been signs at home.

“Hmm. I am not surprised. But are you worried? Do the signs frighten you?” the priest asked.

“No,” I said. “I believe that these things cannot have happened without God’s sanction. They are either from God or God has allowed them to happen. I say this because I have drawn closer to God because of these things.”

“For a young person who had big plans to die so suddenly, the death comes as a shock.”

Yes, Boon had big plans. He had bought a beautiful apartment with a rooftop garden in the east and he was planning to move in in December, in time for Christmas. He had asked me to move in with him.

“Isn’t he already in heaven?” I asked. “Isn’t he with God? Why are there these signs?”

I took the priest’s advice and prayed for Boon and myself. I prayed for acceptance, I prayed for peace. I prayed for us to love God above all things.

What I know now is that death is not a point in time. It is not a moment. Death takes place over a period of time. For the chronically ill, the period of dying is drawn out. For the person who dies suddenly, death also does not occur only at the point when the body fails. It takes time for the soul to be reconciled to its new state. Like his mother and me, like his friends, his family, Boon’s soul had to come to terms with Boon’s death.

I was part of this process. And I thank God for the privilege. Though it was heartrending, I will still say that it was a privilege to witness his soul’s struggle to be alive and his reluctance to leave this world; it was a blessing to be guided to pray for him to look towards heaven. And what a privilege to pray for his soul to be reconciled to God's plan! To pray for Boon to set aside wholeheartedly and gladly all his cares and concerns for the earthly realm, all the ties that still clung to him, and to prepare himself for his journey home.

“We can no longer be together. You are gone; I am still here. But we are together in God. In the biggest scheme of things, the best possible thing has happened. That is all that matters. It really is.”

(to be continued)

The Unknowable

noreply@blogger.com (wheyface) — Wed, 10 Jul 2013 15:28:00 +0000

On the bus to work about a week ago, I was thinking about what I had written about the cloud of witnesses in the book of Hebrews and suddenly I recalled my experience of a cloud in an exhibition.

In 2007 I went to Antony Gormley’s solo exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London. There was an installation work called Blind Light. It was a huge glass cube placed in the centre of one of the galleries. On one of the walls beside the installation, there were photographs of foggy scenes, landscapes swathed in mist. Some of these were taken in woods, in the hills, in mountain areas; some of them were of houses with gardens, or anonymous-looking roads and garden sheds.

The viewer can enter the glass cube, as large as two conjoined living rooms of a HDB 3-room flat, through a narrow doorway. The walls of the cube are made of glass, but the viewers outside cannot see the people inside. There were small nozzles inside the cube that filled it with mist. The cube was also drenched in a brilliant white light.

Entering the cube, I was immediately seized by fear and the desire to make an about turn and quickly get out. I could not see anything, not even my hand held out in front of me until I brought it right up to my face, close enough to touch my nose. In fact, I did exit the cube after taking about seven or eight steps inside. I walked along its perimeter, putting my palm on to the glass at one point when I saw someone else’s hand on the other side. I followed this person’s hand for a bit and after that I went to look at the photographs on the wall. I was buying time, trying to work out if I really needed to go back inside the cube.

Eventually I did go back inside. I walked very slowly. When I was deep inside, I stretched out my arms. I did not touch anything. I remember thinking, this is like being inside a cloud. Later on I read a scholar’s description of it in one of the essays in the catalogue as a “captured cloud”. Inside the cube I could hear some talking, one or two nervous laughs, but mostly, there was silence. The air felt very moist. All the time I was worried that I would walk into someone or that someone would walk into me. Even though I knew the ground was level, I could not help but worry that I might trip and twist my ankle.

Is this what it is like to be disembodied? I wondered. Is this what it feels like to be in heaven? To be in a place that contains other persons, to be bound together in a place but to not see their individual faces and bodies? To be in this place that is filled with so much light that one cannot see?

In an interview in the catalogue Gormley says that for him the most important thing about the work is suggested by the title: “the idea that light itself can be the opposite of illuminating.” He was also interested in undermining assumptions of a room or architecture as being the “location of security and certainty”, that it is “supposed to protect you from the weather, from darkness, from uncertainty.” He created a room that was filled with light, a room with solid glass walls, but it would provide an experience of disorientation, an experience of “losing the bonds of certainty about where or who we are.”

I did not think about architecture whilst I was inside the cube. But I did think about losing my body, or to be more exact, losing my sense of where my body starts and where it ends. So much of what we know is determined by how we experience the world around us as sentient bodies. What is it like to be bereft of the body? How does the soul cope with its impending separation from the body when the body is dying?

(to be continued)

Trust

noreply@blogger.com (wheyface) — Tue, 09 Jul 2013 15:24:00 +0000

The casket was opened. Boon’s mother, aunts, and cousins placed flowers inside. Lilies, white roses, gerbera, chrysanthemum. “You look like Ophelia,” I whispered. It was a brief moment of silliness before the tears came again.

Mourning is the saying of goodbye again and again, accompanied by denial of the death that occasions the saying of goodbye. With cremation, the body is sent away to be destroyed; also sent away and destroyed is the possibility of this denial.

I went outside to where friends huddled around white plastic covered tables. “Come and help us please,” I said.

As the casket was being prepared for the final journey to Mandai Crematorium, I could not bear to watch any more. I turned towards the doorway of the parlour and I was going to walk out when I came face to face with a kindly bespectacled auntie with a thick head of grey wiry permed hair.

On the morning of that last day of the wake I noticed a group of elderly folk, mainly women, whom I had not seen before. I assumed they were distant kin. I had seen this auntie among the group. There was another auntie standing behind her, her hair was short and dark and she was of a slighter build. She too I had seen arriving with the group.

“You have a lot of heart,” the grey-haired auntie said in Hokkien, holding my hands, “Are you Hokkien or Teochew?”

“Hokkien,” I said. “I can speak Hokkien.”

Both of them looked at me with gentle smiles on their faces. The one with the shorter and darker hair stepped forward and took hold of my hands.

I cannot remember what she said but it was something along the lines of “take care” in Mandarin.

When I turned to my left, there was another auntie who seemed to be waiting to speak to me. Earlier on I had seen her and an elderly man arrive with the group of aunties, trailing behind them. I remember being curious about who they were, noticing that they did not speak to anyone.

This auntie also had short dark hair. She clasped my hands firmly and I expected her to ask me if I was Hokkien or Teochew, to have pretty much the same sort of exchange I had just had with the other two elderly women. My attention was drifting away. I was there but I was also beginning to be absent.

The auntie looked deep into my eyes. I was surprised by the intensity of her gaze. Her eyes were soft and kind and bright. She held my hands and said: “Trust that what the Lord has done for you and Boon is the best thing for both of you. Trust in God’s plan for you and Boon.”

In her eyes I saw pure compassion and perfect understanding. I felt like a child who had fallen by the road and this auntie was a passerby who helped me up and took care of me, dressing and soothing my wound as if she were my mother.

Listening to her, hearing the word “trust”, I was shaken out of my numbness and pulled back from despair. I was struck by the intensity and warmth in her concern for me. I was also astonished because she spoke in English. Her English was excellent; she enunciated all the consonants. And there was something else, something that I could not identify at that time.

A day later, I realized what it was. The auntie sounded just like me. She spoke in a voice that sounded like mine. Her choice of words, her sentences, her syntax and tone – her speech seemed uncannily similar to my own.

She called him Boon. Not his Chinese name Junwen or his Cantonese name Zhun Mun like the other old ladies. It wasn't his full name Choon Boon that she used. She called him Boon, the name he identified most closely with.

“Who is this woman?” I wondered on that awful day. A little way behind her I spied the uncle who was with her in the morning. He saw me looking over at him and he smiled, nodding ever so slightly. I did not see them again later on when we were at the columbarium, even though I thought I saw them trailing behind the hearse.

The incident melted away as the hours of that terrible day swept us along, and throughout the journey from the funeral parlour to the columbarium it seemed that I could barely keep myself together, wishing that all this was not happening, wishing that Boon was still alive.

Were they angels? I believe they were.

(to be continued)

The Kindness of Strangers

noreply@blogger.com (wheyface) — Mon, 08 Jul 2013 09:59:00 +0000

Sorrow can’t be shared, my friend F said in a text message after he heard the news last October. Perhaps he meant also to say, I am sorry to hear about what has happened, but I don’t think I can honestly say that I know what it feels like to be in your shoes.

I was glad to hear from him nonetheless. He showed his concern when he sent me the text message, even if it was a message that spelt out his inability to share my sadness.

The sorrow is a piece of invisible shrapnel buried inside. There are outward signs – the swollen, reddened eyes; the pallid dry skin; the tightness in the ribs. But only the soul knows its burden, the barren seed of sorrow it carries, barren because it has no leaves, no flowers, but rapacious roots that jut and dig into flesh and bone.

Most outward of all is the crying. Crying that leads to nausea and retching – this could be the body’s way of trying to expel the sorrow, first through tears, and then through a kind of hurling action.

When Boon was in ICU, there were mornings when I woke up with words of prayer spilling from my lips. After he died, these eruptions were replaced by fits of wordless weeping. I did not note down the date or day when I stopped waking up in this way.

On October 24, a week after the funeral, it was late at night and I was lying in bed crying. I felt that the pain I was in was unbearable. I fumbled for my journal and pen, and started to scribble. “Today started badly . . .” The entry ended with the sentence: “The pain is sometimes unbearable.” I had to put down the pen because I was sobbing and coughing convulsively. My mobile rang. It was a friend. "Eh, what are you doing?" Hearing her voice calmed me down. We chatted for a short while, and after the call ended, I opened a book of devotional writings for women that I had started to read, one chapter a day. Two dear friends JC and KY gave me this book when they came to the hospital to pray for Boon.

The first paragraph went: “God is not wasting the pain in your life. He never wastes a wound. He’s healing you at this very moment and using that pain to show you a dream bigger than you realise. But you need to trust Him. When you trust, you allow room for hope.”

Not believing my eyes, I went on reading: “When we are in the deep, deep valley, we must hold on to the assurance that God stands firm and strong behind us. Nothing we experience will be wasted. It will all be used for our good – to make us stronger, to make us walk closer to Him, to give us a more loving heart. In our greatest pain we need to lean heavily on God.”

Most of the chapters in the book are about the everyday struggles of Christian women who juggle career and family responsibilities, ordinary women with ordinary problems. That chapter about pain pulled me back from the brink of despair, from losing all sight of hope. The reminder that I had the protection of God’s grace and mercy, was the reminder that I needed to hear. My soul was grief-stricken, but it was no longer wretched. Before October 6, the devil had me in his claws. After October 6 came the worst days of my life. It may sound incredible, but they were also the best days of my life. Jesus had not given up on me. After all my years of backsliding, Jesus was still calling my name. If those had not been the worst days of my life, I might not have answered.

Sorrow cannot be shared. But a kind word, a gesture of compassion, a text message or a call, however brief or self-deprecating, can offer comfort. In her book The Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion mentions the “instinctive wisdom” of a friend who brought her a bowl of congee every day for the first few weeks after her husband died suddenly from a heart attack: “Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat.”

I was also blessed with such matter-of-fact kindness from friends and strangers, people who had heard about the situation from friends or people who knew Boon and had heard about me from him but had not yet met me. Someone I didn’t know, an acquaintance of Boon’s, sent me a Whatsapp message every morning, starting from the third day. The mornings were terrible because I would wake up and realise that he was still in ICU and that there had been no call from the nurses during the night. I slept with the mobile switched on and placed next to my pillow, hoping that the nurses would call me in the middle of the night to say he had woken up. The Whatsapp messages from the stranger, now a dear friend, were a God-send. There was sometimes a Bible verse in the message, but most of the time, the message just said, “Good morning, Wei Wei!” They were the equivalent of the congee Didion’s friend brought her.

There was the PA of one of my bosses whom I had to call because I could not return to the office for a meeting. I left a voice message on her phone. When she returned my call, I was sitting in the corridor, paralyzed by fear and anxiety. I had never met her before, in fact, we had never spoken before. But she said very comforting words and promised to pray for Boon. A few days later I received a CD and card from her.

Sorrow cannot be shared. But God does know our pain, reading our souls like open books, seeing all the cuts and bruises, all the coldness and brokenness our hearts have suffered. And He does not tell us to be strong, because He knows that we are not strong. He sends words that are more than mere words. He sends us friends and strangers who become friends.

(to be continued)

The Invisible (II)

noreply@blogger.com (wheyface) — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 10:22:00 +0000

When the invisible realm becomes visible, what should we do with what we have seen, when our powers of vision and understanding are imperfect and limited?

On the morning of October 16, 2012, the second day of the wake, an old friend AL drove me back to my flat at Jalan Batu at around two. I needed a lie-down very badly. There was a service later that evening. Many of Boon’s colleagues and ex-colleagues came to the wake to pay their respects during the lunch hour. The news had spread. He was very well-liked. There were a lot of people, and it was all rather overwhelming. Apart from me, one of Boon’s aunts (Auntie C), his mother and half-brother were at the parlour. I texted AL in the morning and was relieved when she said she could come and help out.

At the flat I asked AL if she wanted to rest too. She lay on Boon’s side of the bed, and both of us fell asleep. I had a strange dream where Boon was mad at me because I did not ask AL to change into a fresh set of clothes before she lay down on the bed. I did not see his face; he was a dark shadowy form and I saw him standing at the doorway of the flat, facing the corridor outside, and then he left in a huff. But in less than 2 minutes, he came back. I did not see him coming back inside, but I could sense that he did come back and that he was no longer upset. At this point I woke up.

Through half-open eyes still heavy with sleep, I looked at AL whose eyes were closed. I shook her arm.

“AL, AL, I had a dream about Boon. He came back here and he got really upset with me cos I let you sleep on the bed in your outside clothes. But he wasn’t mad for long.”

“Umm,” AL muttered.

I turned to the other side. Through the doorway of the bedroom, I could see the living room. I closed my eyes and napped for about ten or fifteen minutes more.

I saw a startlingly similar image to that of my dream two days later. We were at Mandai. It was the day after Boon’s cremation, October 18, 2012. A plastic box containing parts of bones and other brittle chalky bits was on the table. Beside it lay a hand hammer, chisel, and a point. We stood around the table, in a semi-circle; Auntie C, Boon’s mother, his half-brother, one of his uncles, and me. There was a man there from the stonemason. The undertaker had arranged for this man to be the one to conduct the ceremony of placing Boon’s ashes into the urn.

Someone made a comment about the bones being large. The stonemason man said this showed the person was not old. He then turned to Boon’s mother and said to her in Mandarin that after death, we become spirits. He took an iPad out and thrust it under Boon’s mother’s nose, saying, see this, see with your own eyes. It was video footage from security cameras in the crematorium, he said.

Even as I noticed the resemblance between the shadowy form that appeared on the screen of the iPad and what I saw in my dream a few days ago, I was enraged and appalled by what this man was doing and saying. I don’t know why but my reaction was to pray aloud at that very moment. In my journal entry about this incident, an entry that was also a letter addressed to Boon, I wrote:

“You have to make your way to God’s light, where you shall reside for eternity. This is why I was enraged by the stonemason’s conduct at the crematorium yesterday morning. The Holy Spirit rebuked him through me, through a prayer that states clearly that all of us who believe in the Lord God will return to Him after our earthly bodies are no longer inhabitable and that our spirits will be at home in heaven, not loitering around in crematorium spaces or anywhere on this earth.

For this reason the Holy Spirit instructed me to pray aloud, to pray this understanding for all [who were present in that room] to hear, to know without even the slightest shred of doubt, that your spirit, you, Boon, you are back in our Lord Father’s arms, peaceful, happier than you have ever been even when we were at our happiest together, because you are saved.

For this same reason I should take heart. I should stop looking over my shoulders. Looking in mirrors. Looking and searching for your presence in this flat. You have left. But you know what, I know you are watching over me . . .”

(to be continued)

The Invisible (I)

noreply@blogger.com (wheyface) — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 10:19:00 +0000

Between 1996 and 2000 I lived in an Edwardian terrace house in Cambridge. The front door opened to a small vestibule where coats and hats could be hung by the side. There was a door between the vestibule and the hallway. Down the hallway there was another door. This one opened on to the kitchen.

The moment I stepped into the kitchen with its stripped pine floorboards and the windows at the back that looked out on to the garden, I fell in love with the house. I could see myself cooking in that kitchen.

It was the summer of 1999. I was sitting in the kitchen one night, chatting with a friend G. It was about ten o’clock. I shared the house with two other women who were also postgraduate students. Both of them were not at home that evening. M usually came home late from the Physical Chemistry laboratory unless it was Wimbledon or cricket season, and F had gone back to London to see her father and brother.

Cambridge is a quiet town, except at pub closing hours in the town centre or during the time of the May balls. My street was especially tranquil.

Apart from G’s voice and mine, there were no other sounds. We were talking animatedly about something or other when suddenly there was the sound of a cough in the hallway. The door to the kitchen was closed. G looked at me and I looked at him.

“Did you just cough?” he asked. The look on his face showed that he knew as well as I did that it was a stupid question. I shook my head slowly.

“Has M come back?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “We would have heard her coming in if she had come back.” M tended to stomp up the stairs.

“That was definitely a cough, right?” he said.

Yes, it was a cough, and neither of us had coughed.

I was worried that there might be a burglar in the house. I wanted to look in the other rooms, including the ones upstairs, and I asked G to accompany me. First we had to open the door to the hallway. There was no one in the hallway. Next we went to the front. The front parlour (which I used as my study) was dark, so I turned on the lights. It was empty. We opened the door to the vestibule, and then I examined the front door before opening it. The latch was not broken. We went upstairs and I went into every room, turning on the light, looking in the corners. Nothing seemed to be amiss.

We went back to the kitchen. G picked up his bicycle lights and said he had to head home. He asked me if I was going to be alright on my own until M came back. I was surprised he did not offer to keep me company until M’s return, but I said I was fine and he could go ahead. Perhaps that was the point at which I realized that G was not as cool and self-possessed as he tried to be. It is quite a different thing, critiquing ghost stories at literary graduate student seminars and finding yourself playing a cameo role in one.

Looking back now, I suspect G probably wanted to cycle back to his house as fast as his legs could pedal. Funnily enough I did not feel frightened once I was sure the house had not been broken into. My sense of reassurance came from my love and yes, you could say, my trust of the house. I had always been comfortable in that house, it had the aura of a good and happy place, a nice vibe.

I remember thinking, if there was a spirit, he or she was a benign spirit. “You can stay here,” I said to the spirit in my head, “I guess you have been here for a long time. But please don’t cause any trouble. I have to finish my PhD.”

I told M about the incident. She said she too had heard sounds of someone coming into the house whilst she was in the kitchen and when she checked later, she realized she was alone. We agreed not to say anything to F because we thought she might freak out. We also did not think there was any harm in not telling her. She was very close to submitting her thesis and we did not want her to lose her focus.

A month or so later, on a late Sunday afternoon, it crossed my mind that I had the deeds of the house going back all the way to its first owner. If I look through them, I would be able to see the names of the people who used to live here, I remember thinking. I took out the small bundle of papers and untied the thin ribbon secured around them.

I was sitting on the carpeted floor of my study, close to the fireplace, and the golden light and warmth of the afternoon streamed in through the bay windows. I allowed my eyes to move slowly over the names. On some of the papers, the occupation of the person was listed. It was upon a pair of names that I paused, a brother and his sister, both of whom lived in the house for a good part of their adulthood, and as I gazed at the woman’s name, I remember thinking, this is the one.

I have a good memory but I don’t remember their names and their occupation. I don’t remember the dates either. This is probably the effect of an intention, either my own, or God’s.

I tied up the bundle carefully and put it away. When the house was sold a few months before I left Cambridge, I asked the solicitor if I could keep the title deeds. He said yes, probably thinking I was being sentimental. I gave it quite some thought, perhaps I was being sentimental, and perhaps I wanted a memento. But in the end, something in my bones told me not to take them with me.

I did not know her. It is quite a different matter to encounter in this supernatural fashion someone you love and knew as a breathing bodily person. Someone you miss. I know I am not alone in having such experiences. Why do they occur? What do they signify?

(to be continued)

Change

noreply@blogger.com (wheyface) — Thu, 04 Jul 2013 10:39:00 +0000

On November 8, 2012, I wrote about October 17, the day of the cremation:

The coach was parked along the curb outside the entrance to the Church Of Our Lady of Lourdes. The coffin had already been loaded into the hearse. On the coach I sat next to SF, a friend since art school days at Stamford Court in 2007. She had taken leave to be with me. The rain got heavier.

From Ophir Road the coach turned into Kallang Road. The shophouses and trees that flanked the right side of the road reminded me of dinners at Arab Street. Boon liked Middle Eastern cuisine. He was fond of figs and kebabs.

“Why are they still standing?” I asked SF. I was staring at the trees through the rain-streaked glass of the coach windows.

“They will be pulled down one day,” SF said with a sigh, thinking that I was referring to the shophouses. So much of the Singapore she and I grew up in has disappeared. How can we not be influenced by this ideology of the ever-new, the tabula rasa (coined by Rem Koolhaas for our island city of constant change)? Our sense of time is shaped by how our society deals with old things. Demolish them and replace them with shiny new things. Nothing is irreplaceable.

But I was looking through a different frame that day. Why was everything outside still intact? Why did the trees stand tall, their trunks sturdy, unshaken? Why were their branches still outstretched? Why were the leaves still attached to the branches? Why were the shophouses still standing? Why did they not crumble? Why was everything still the same?

The roads we used to drive on, the places we used to eat at, the buildings we used to drive past, the plants along the Nicoll Highway, the trees at the Armenian Street car park, the trees at the car park behind Timbre and Substation – they are the same. Meanwhile I can no longer say "we" and mean Boon and I in any futural sense.

How could I return to Tiong Bahru where Boon’s old flat used to be, the neighbourhood of his childhood, those familiar streets where we walked my dogs? I will never be able to face those places again, the fruit stall, the Yong Tau Foo stall, the steamboat place in the corner kopitiam. They would all still be the same.

“Where's $4?” the uncle at the Yong Tau Foo stall asked Boon in Mandarin when Boon went to the stall without me. When Boon told me this, both of us laughed and laughed at the thought of me being called $4. (I always had the $4 bowl, Boon the $5.)

* * *

Today is July 4, 2013. Eight months have passed. And this is what I write today:

Never say never. On February 14 this year, at lunch time, I took a bus to Tiong Bahru. A few weeks ago I would not have been able to drive past Great World City without breaking down. On the bus I read a text message from an acquaintance asking me if I was doing okay. I texted a standard reply. I’m ok, how are you? My mind was partly on something the counselor said at one of the sessions. Going back to places where Boon and I used to hang out, this is part of the process of coming to terms with his death.

It started to rain heavily. I did not eat at the Yong Tau Foo stall, I ate at a curry rice stall that I had not patronised before, drank a cup of teh si siu dai, took a bus back to the office.

I did not want to fall sick again, having consumed enough antibiotics to wipe out several colonies of germs in January, so I concentrated on not getting wet. I was so absorbed by my efforts to stay dry that I did not think about anything else. It was still pouring when I left Tiong Bahru.

And this is how life carries you with it. This is the mechanism of carrying on, the cogs and wheels of me, me, me, I, I, I. It rains heavily and we focus on not getting wet. No time or energy to philosophize, to be “emo” (this is still such a peculiar word to me).

On April 11, I went back to Tiong Bahru for lunch again. This time I was not alone. SS, one of the editors in my team, was with me. We had Yong Tau Foo. After that we went for a short walk around the neighbourhood. We were very pleased to see our titles in a children’s book shop. I bought a book and a goodbye card for a friend and former colleague who was heading back to the States with his partner and baby girl. There was a bit of drizzle but the skies cleared in no time at all and the sun was out when SS and I headed back to the office in a cab.

(to be continued)

The Remoteness Of Heaven

noreply@blogger.com (wheyface) — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 13:27:00 +0000

No, I had never heard anything about a cloud before. I had heard the phrases “called home,” “rest in peace,” but a “cloud of witnesses,” I had not heard of before. It was most likely at my second session of counseling that the counselor mentioned Hebrews 12:1. Following the advice of friends, I had started to see a counselor at the Wesley Methodist Counseling Centre in November 2012. The counselor explained that when Christian souls leave this life, they join a heavenly host of Christian souls who watch over the living and cheer them on.

“When we see our loved ones in heaven, we do not resume our earthly relationships,” he explained.

“Do we recognize each other?” I asked.

“My mother will know that I was her son, and I will recognize her too, but we will not call each other by those names. We will all simply be God’s children.”

I struggled to understand this. How will we know that this person used to be my partner or that person my relative if our earthly ties no longer count for anything in the Christian afterlife? How can we recognize each other and yet not carry on with the lives we had together until everything was disrupted by death?

The afterlife. The ever after. How do I write about an experience that I have not yet experienced? What am I to say about it?

In my twenties I studied The Divine Comedy as part of research for my dissertation. When I started, I thought I would finish the dissertation in three years. It took me five years in the end, and the first one and a half years were spent reading The Divine Comedy. The work is made up of three canticles: “Inferno,” “Purgatorio,” and “Paradiso.” I had read the poem before, when I was an undergraduate. I got to the end of “Purgatorio,” I think, and I gave up. My favourite canticle then was “Inferno.” Plenty of drama and action, lots of graphic images – that was why I liked it.

It was only when I studied the poem in greater detail a few years later that I began to realise that Dante’s journey from Hell to Paradise is a journey back to God. A journey made by a living person through the different realms of the afterlife. God is at the pinnacle of heaven; and when the protagonist reaches this place, he comes face to face with “the Love that moves the stars and all other things” and there the poem ends.

When I finished my dissertation in 2000, my choice of favourite canticle changed to “Purgatorio.” It is in this second canticle that Dante writes about souls who look back on their earthly lives with longing and nostalgia. His protagonist meets, among others, the souls of dead poets and musicians whose songs and poems are remembered and quoted with respect and affection.

The final destination of heaven in “Paradiso” where the protagonist meets soul after soul who have ascended to the circles of heaven and asks them profound theological questions (receiving profound theological answers) – that was not my cup of tea.

The “cloud of witnesses” in Hebrews 12:1 – now that’s Paradiso material, through and through. If we believe in heaven, if we believe in eternal life, then our eyes should focus on that, not on the things of this earth.

Many of the episodes and encounters in “Purgatorio” end with the souls singing hymns, reminding themselves to look ahead to heaven. Yet the call of the past is often still strong, and they cannot help but look back and remember the people they have had to leave behind, their families, their friends, their earthly loves and desires.

Nostalgia is easier to comprehend than joining a cloud of witnesses. Nostalgia begins and ends with the self. What I used to have. Who I used to love. Who I used to be. Becoming part of God’s community of souls in heaven, the earthly self becomes thoroughly irrelevant. This is difficult to accept because I am rooted still to my being here, in the here and now.

The reality of Boon’s presence in my life now is no longer as who he used to be in my life, but who he has become, joining God’s cloud of witnesses. I know this, I sense this. Yet the reality of that final place for myself is something that has not properly sunk in. I have started re-reading “Paradiso,” but I find that I am still having trouble liking it more than “Purgatorio.”

Hebrews 12:1

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us”

(to be continued)

Hearing

noreply@blogger.com (wheyface) — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 10:23:00 +0000

Boon loved music. Classical music, jazz, pop, rock, blues, Chinese R&B, world music – his taste was as eclectic as mine. Sitting in his car I listened to Ali Farke Toure, Joni Mitchell, Chinese songstress from the fifties Li Xianglan, the National, Jay Chou, Bach. Perhaps he loved jazz most of all. We never did go to a jazz club together – I am not really a late night person and also, back then I got up early every morning to write before I went to work; the couple of times he suggested that we check out a jazz gig, I turned him down.

I saw him play jazz guitar once. It was at V and D’s home. They had invited us to their place because it was V’s birthday. One of their dads was strumming a guitar and D asked Boon to play. Boon was very reluctant, he kept protesting that he was out of practice. But when he finally did play, he played “Satin Doll” and it was just excellent. I remember saying to him in the car as we left V and D’s place, hey, you’re really talented, yah, and you looked so happy, you should play more often.

He had classical guitar lessons every Thursday. I wish I could say that he was just as good at classical guitar, but I would be lying if I did. I could hear him practicing even though he played in the living room and he sounded constrained, even tortured at times. At least once a month, Boon would ask me whether if he should quit classical guitar and go back to jazz guitar.

One of the later conversations went something like this:

“I should stop talking about this and just decide, right?”

“Yes, please decide and let this matter go into the out-tray once and for all.”
“I can’t decide . . .”
“Why not do both? Nobody’s forcing you to choose . . .”
“Ya, but I also want to do tai chi and kettlebell and I want to have time to read . . .”
“And you are doing all those things what. No need to be angsty about this sort of thing, please.”

When Boon was in ICU, I talked to him every day after the social worker got permission for his mother and me to enter his room. There wasn’t much variety in what I said to him – I said almost always the same things, several times each day, and I said them every day. I suspect I probably also said: “It’s my turn to be the whiny and repetitive one. You can tell me to stop it and to put this in the out-tray.” He lay there, silent, his eyes closed.

But I was certain he could hear me. On October 9, the Tuesday when his mother and I were told in the morning that the operation had to be cancelled, I gowned up and went into his room and he moved his head in my direction when he heard my voice. He teared. After he collapsed on October 6, we were not allowed into his room and he had not heard a single familiar voice since that Saturday. There was a nurse who was checking something on the other side of the room and she looked at me and said, “He responds to you.” The next day other people who looked in through the glass said the same thing.

Hearing is the first faculty that we develop and the last one to go before we die. The social worker told me that when I said I didn’t know what to do and she suggested that I go in and speak to him. When his friends wanted to do something for him, they got together and recorded messages for him on a MP3 player.

I told him everything I needed him to hear. Poor Boon! He had to lie there and listen to me go on and on and he had no choice but to listen. The reversal of our usual roles brought a wry smile to my face, actually, whenever I thought about it.

I sang hymns to him. I talked and prayed with him. I told him we were two broken-hearted people who found solace in each other’s company, that we were lost souls. I explained to him why I was not as sure about him as he was sure about me. I told him about my deep sense of shame, about my sense of failure as a woman. I told him why I never talked to him about church. I told him about God.

October 12 was the day Father Yin came and prayed for him. After I heard that Boon moved his head during the prayer, I rushed into his room and started to explain to him why I wasn’t there, how his friends C and D had insisted that I eat something and they accompanied me to the food court downstairs. I told him that I had asked C if it was wrong of me to pray with Boon and to talk to him about God, to ask him to cling to the Cross, when all the time we were together I knew Boon to be a non-Christian. C said that Boon was a searcher all his life and that Boon would do anything for me.

After I recounted to him what C had said, Boon’s shoulders moved for the first time and his upper torso turned towards me. My eyes almost popped out and I jumped up and down in joy. “You moved! You moved!” I cried out and immediately after that words of thanksgiving streamed from my mouth. I thought he had been healed at last, that this was the miraculous recovery we had hoped and prayed for. I was overjoyed.

Dr. S explained that by that point Boon’s brain was damaged and that was why he could not open his eyes, he could not even move a finger. How was it possible for him to move his head and his shoulders? I asked the doctors. Isn’t this a sign that he was going to recover?

When the nurses changed the dialysis machine the next day, we hoped that this was also a sign that he was on the mend. When I asked the nurses, they said that the machine was not working well, so that’s why they changed it.

That time when Boon moved towards me, lifting his shoulders, that was the last time he responded to me. And it was a sign. Not of the body’s recovery but a sign nonetheless of healing. The most important sign that a soul makes with all the freedom of his or her God-given free will.

In April this year, I read CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity and found a passage about free will and love which says it so much better than I ever could. I meant to show it to a friend who was asking me searching questions about faith:

“The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.”

(To be continued)

More Than Mere Words

noreply@blogger.com (wheyface) — Mon, 01 Jul 2013 09:48:00 +0000

In an earlier post I mentioned that I prayed on the morning of October 14 and was directed to the book of Daniel. I should explain that that was a pretty new experience for me. To pray and be led to a specific chapter or verse in the Bible was thoroughly novel. The kind of thing I have heard other Christians speak about; and though I did not voice my scepticism, I did not take such talk seriously.

Flip through the Bible and wherever you happened to pause, there was bound to be a verse or a passage that could be moulded to shed light on your personal affairs. Kind of like horoscopes. It was not difficult to derive personal relevance from the horoscope reading for the day/week/month.

A Christian who read horoscopes – I am ashamed to say it, but that was how I was.

I knew of course that scripture is God’s word. And I had learnt from sermons and bible study discussions that prayer is our direct line of communication with God. I had no trouble at all regurgitating these beliefs as if I thoroughly knew what was meant by them. I prayed eloquently at bible study meetings, and I analyzed the Bible at these meetings with the intention of understanding God’s word. I knew that prayer and scripture were more than mere words. But in my approach towards them, I behaved as if they were no different from mere words.

I have always had a pretty good memory for numbers, but I was not good at remembering chapter or verse numbers. I love to read but I did not feel inclined to read the Bible from start to finish and I was not at all bothered by the fact that I was not familiar with it.

I preferred the New Testament because I could read the gospels like novels, especially Luke. I did not see anything wrong with my attitude at all. And that was when I still read the Bible. Before October 2012, I had not touched my bible for five years. I thought of giving it away to the Salvation Army.

On October 9, 2012, Boon's mother and I were called into the doctors' meeting room in the morning. The social worker was also present. We were informed that Boon’s operation for the implanting of the mechanical heart device had to be cancelled. The surgeon said that Boon was too weak to undergo open heart surgery because he was down with pneumonia. They were also reluctant to operate on him because he had not regained consciousness and he did not respond to simple commands.

After the meeting I sat in the corridor outside the Cardiac-Thoracic ICU. I was feeling defeated and crushed by the doctors’ prognosis in the morning. Boon’s mother was sitting beside me and I did not know how to comfort her. I did not want to go home, but sitting in the corridor made me feel helpless. My thoughts and emotions were in a vortex.

"The only thing you can and should do is pray." Something whispered to me, and I listened to it. And then came another hint, as gentle and firm as the first.

"Wouldn’t it be comforting to have your bible close to you as you pray?" At this I took the bible out of my bag, placed it on my lap, and rested my clasped hands on it.

I prayed, my hands clasped on top of the Bible. When I opened the Bible, my eyes rested on Psalm 23. After the first two verses, I remember thinking, oh this one, yes, I have heard it before. But there was something else.

I don’t know how else to say it except that as the words of the Psalmist entered my mind and sounded in my ears, the scales fell off my eyes. I bowed my head and continued to pray, weaving the verses of the psalm into my prayer.

I will say now that it was the Holy Spirit that directed me to find consolation and peace by reading God’s word. And the other thing I will add is that when our prayer requests are precise and detailed, don’t be surprised if God’s answers are just as precise and detailed.

My prayer was about poor Boon’s lonely fight for his life, and how frightened and alone he must feel, not being able to open his eyes to see us, not being able to speak or to move. The answer that came swift and to the point via Psalm 23 was:

"Don’t worry, Boon is not alone, God is by his side; in the valley of the shadow of death, we need not be fearful for God is there with us."

In the remaining days at SGH, I read Psalm 23 to Boon many times and I prayed over it, doing it as much to draw comfort from it for myself as to encourage Boon, to remind him that the Lord our God is our shepherd.

Psalm 23

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters.

He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

When do we start to believe that God is directly and specifically present in our lives? For me, it was not that afternoon when I read and prayed through Psalm 23. The thought that something merciful and mysterious was happening did occur to me but I brushed it aside. Too many layers of self-love, self-will, self-conceit had accrued and calcified over the years. Other signs and wonders were to come and in such form and numbers that I could no longer dismiss them as coincidence.

(to be continued)

Grief At First, At Last

noreply@blogger.com (wheyface) — Fri, 28 Jun 2013 10:30:00 +0000

Reading Robin Robertson’s elegy for his father “A Show of Signs” I recognised the evocation of grief like a punch in the stomach.

The fourth stanza carries particular resonance:

Death is first absence, then a presence

Of the dead amongst the living:

The kick of grief like a turning fin, that whelms

But cannot break the surface.

The word “whelms” fills your mouth. If I was to teach this poem, I would say to the students: feel this word in your mouth, see how you have to slow down when you say it, experience this slowing down as part of the jerky rhythm of the line. It is a word that seems to overwhelm the mouth, like the grief overwhelming the poet. Sound embodying meaning: onomatopoeia.

The first two lines relate the experience of loss that anyone who has ever lost a relative, a friend or a lover can identify with. The dead is forever gone, no longer present among the living. Yet he or she is also, very soon, present. Through the memories that cling on; snapshots from the past; the recalled voice or laugh; the vanished smile.

The image of grief in the other two lines is an image of a fish’s fin turning underwater and everything under its arch is submerged. This is the force of grief: it has a “kick” that does not break through to air, an inward-turning, disabling force.

What happens to grief over time? It is felt less as a “kick”, more like something banal assimilated into the everyday, of a piece with the mundane. It will appear to have disappeared. Life will appear to have gone on, the living will appear to have moved on.

But make no mistake: the absence of the dead person has become “presence,” altering the lives of the grieving persons left behind. “The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything,” writes CS Lewis after the death of his wife in A Grief Observed.

Life does go on, but so does grief. Grief does not end. Who I am after Boon’s death is distinct from who I was before. Have I not lost others through death before? Yes. My great grandmother – when I was eight. Her health had been failing over a long period of time. A much-loved colleague at the school – a sudden unexpected loss. But not this close – not a lover.

A friend of Boon’s, CC, was on his way to Korea when he heard about Boon. He flew back to Singapore instead, together with his wife, and they came straight to the hospital from the airport. Both of them spent a lot of time comforting me and Boon’s mom as we sat and waited in the corridor. CC said to me during one of those afternoon vigils: this will be a turning point for you. Nothing will be the same again. I took it to mean, that when Boon recovers and is discharged, everything in our lives will have to change. Why of course, I thought. I never thought he would not wake up again. If the thought came to me, I rejected it.

Now CC’s words can be understood in terms of Boon’s presence in my life as an absence. By presence I do not mean that grieving for him consumes my life. No, not that. Presence in terms of remembering who he was, what a great guy he was, how bloody annoying he could be sometimes about cleanliness, and how obsessive he was about keeping records, filing old emails, keeping post-it note pads in the car.

Presence in terms of not pushing away fragments of him that surface from time to time. Like this morning. Waking up and seeming to hear his voice. It made me sad, but it also made me smile as I forced myself to get out of bed and make the first bitter cup of espresso. Good morning. I remember the sound of his voice. Good.

Grief becomes part of the living’s understanding of who he or she is after the death of the loved one. Like love, it does not come to a full stop when the loved one stops breathing. Don’t we continue to miss the things we have lost after we lose them? I lost an umbrella in 2011 that I had owned and used since I was 18 and I still think of it sometimes.

(An umbrella, Wei! Get a grip! – Actually . . . I lie when I say that I think of it sometimes. I think of it very, very often.)

The last date in the journal started on October 7: November 12, same year, 2012. That was the day after what would have been Boon’s 35^th birthday if he had still been alive on November 11, 2012. On the bus to work today I re-read what I wrote yesterday and I had to get the tissue out. Grief kicks and whelms me.

As long as we love, we continue to grieve. Because of love, we cherish our grief, we take care of it, we allow it to take its rightful place in our hearts. It can reside there, truthfully, legitimately, with a name.

The presence of absence can also refer to that less than clear-cut divide between the living and the dead at the earlier stages of mourning. The living may continue to discover things about the dead, and their relationship may seem to the living to continue to evolve because of the newly attained knowledge about the dead person. “Why didn’t you tell me …” “I had no idea she was good at …” New sides of the person are uncovered, and even though the person is no longer around, the living grow in their understanding of the dead. New insight nurtures the relationship, adding new layers to it, albeit unilaterally.

This is why some people continue to speak to the dead. They speak out loud, as if the person is there. They tell the dead how their day was, what they had for lunch, who they saw at church. It sounds rather theatrical, doesn’t it? Well, I went through it, and when I talked to Boon in this fashion for a few weeks after his death, I did not feel like I was acting. I did not think, oh no, I have truly lost it. No – talking to Boon felt like the most natural thing in the world to be doing. But there also came a time when these one-way conversations stopped. I cannot remember why or how. And the nightly dreams of Boon – after a while, they too stopped. The dream last night was the first one I have had since March.

(to be continued)

From the Journal ~ October 14, 2012

noreply@blogger.com (wheyface) — Fri, 28 Jun 2013 00:47:00 +0000

October 14, 2012

Boon my darling,

Your blood pressure and heart rate descended from 6.30 a.m. to around 10 when Dr. S came out to the corridor to speak to your mother and me. I had woken up at 5.30, feeling an urgency to rush to the hospital, but also a strange calm. I prayed and flipped through the Bible and was led to Daniel 6. Daniel's miraculous survival in the den of lions. Darius' witness and proclamation of God. How my eyes opened! I recorded a reading of this chapter for you. And as S and I suggested, I personalised it for you. ~~Oh Boon, I don't know why, but the~~ God sending angels to close the mouths of lions -- what is disease and physical infirmity to him?

On the way to SGH I looked up the lyrics of "What A Friend We have In Jesus" and I sang a bit of it as I walked, because I thought I could record it for you. But later on, when I was in your room, after I played the Daniel recording for you, I sang you the song. Did you hear me? It has long been one of my favourite faith songs. All my sins and griefs to bear.

"What a friend we have in Jesus
All our sins and griefs to bear
What a privilege to carry
Everything to God in prayer."

--------

I am at A's flat in Buangkok. I hope you are not looking for me at the Batu flat. I should be back there tomorrow. You have left your body. I saw the shell today. When did you leave?

11.40 p.m.

---------

When I put the earphones on you this morning, I thought there was something different. And when I sang to you, I felt it again. I was staring at your face the whole time. It seemed to me that there was something different about you; you did not seem to be there.

I don't know why but I turned to look at the foot of your bed where there was nothing except for the machines. When I prayed for you and I held your hand, there was something different, though I could not say what it was exactly.

Did I turn to look at the foot of your bed because your soul had left your broken body, like a snake sheds its old skin, and was standing there, looking at it, trying to take this in, like me?

---------

We are our bodies -- and more. The body is just a shell. A precious and beautiful shell individually made for each one of us so that no two bodies are ever the same.

Why did your shell give up?

(to be continued)

The Heart

noreply@blogger.com (wheyface) — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 08:57:00 +0000

According to movies, pop songs, poems, novels, plays, the heart is an organ that can ache to the point of breaking. See Ophelia. See Romeo and Juliet. It can also be an index of excitement, elation. At the nearness of the beloved, the heart starts to race, the heartbeat increasing dramatically. When I first encountered courtly lyric poetry of the European middle ages, I was amused to find that the symptoms of desire and infatuation were as physical back in the 1200’s as they were in the 1990’s. The male poet might speak of a great physical discomfort in the left side, sometimes even to the point of trembling violently when he is in the presence of the invariably perfect and unattainable beloved.

The heart was wordplay until a time in my mid-twenties when my first significant romantic relationship ended. In the middle of an uncontrollable crying fit in my bedroom, I suddenly felt a twinge in the left side of my chest. I got up and drew the curtains. It was summer and the light was golden. I could hear laughter and voices, probably my neighbours and their children enjoying the sun in their back garden. But I was consumed first by my pain and then by this sudden physical manifestation of the emotional tumult inside of me. It astonished me, the sharpness of the jab and where I felt it. It surprised me to learn that that the love songs and love poems I had studied were not figurative: unhappiness can cause the heart such strain and duress.

After Boon’s collapse, all this trafficking in metaphors and analogies seemed to be irrelevant and useless when placed next to the analyses of the heart, its functions and its ailments furnished by the medical professionals who spoke to me or that I searched and found on the internet. Translated into my layperson’s understanding, this is what I learnt:

The heart is a pump, the engine that gets blood to move around the body, powering the work of the other organs. When the heart stops pumping, oxygen can’t be transported via the bloodstream; without oxygen, other parts of the body cannot function.

The brain is the main command centre. When the brain can’t function properly, even if the ears can hear a simple instruction like “Move your fingers if you can hear me,” the fingers will not move. Nothing will happen because the command centre has shut down. Brain damage sets in 3 minutes after the heart has stopped.

After an attack, the heart can be resuscitated using CPR (Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation). To prevent damage to the other organs, CPR has to be immediately rendered. Without CPR or other forms of intervention, the stopping of the heart leads to death within 10 minutes.

I searched for diagrams of the heart on the internet and I learnt that the average size of an adult human heart is the size of a fist. The average weight is 300g. There are four chambers inside the heart. The ones upstairs are called atria and they receive the blood that flows back into the heart. The ones downstairs are called ventricles and they move the blood out of the heart to other parts of the body.

The images that came to mind:

Chambers are rooms. A fist is a hand that is closed, a fist formed when the fingers are curled into a ball. Clench and unclench the fist and there is movement in the hand and wrist. A heart that has stopped is a frozen fist. A heart that has stopped is a building where the light has gone out in some or all of the rooms.

The questions that also came:

Why would the heart of a healthy person suddenly stop? Was it too laden with care? Too weary to continue with the tiresome tiring business of living? Was the person, in spite of all appearances, heartbroken in some deep irreparable way?

So it was back to psychological hypothesizing, a spiral of why’s and what if’s.

For the answers that medical science could be relied upon to provide talked about Boon as a physiological entity, not the whole person who had a personality with lovable and annoying traits, someone with his own unique laundry list of likes and peeves, his talents, his strengths and weaknesses, his propensity to nag and whine, his kindness, his experiences of hope, loss, rejection, disappointment, love.

In the map of Boon that the doctors drew, there was an organ that had stopped, other organs that began to fail, a body that was beginning to fail. But I had a different map of Boon. Where was his soul in their map? The soul that could not be registered on the screens of the machines that surrounded the island of his bed in the ICU. The soul that could not be drawn like the blood and sent for tests.

What happens to the soul when the body begins to become uninhabitable? Is the soul not connected to the heart? The medieval poets who wrote about the physical violent symptoms of love and desire were not writing about bodily malfunctions; they were writing about the soul’s distress that is manifest in the wild palpitations of the heart.

We are our bodies – and more. So when the body begins to break down, how does the soul cope? When the heart stops, what happens to the soul?

(to be continued)

Record of the Nine Days

noreply@blogger.com (wheyface) — Wed, 26 Jun 2013 06:06:00 +0000

On October 7, the day after Boon's heart attack, I started a new journal. In its pages there is a record of what I learnt about Boon's condition over the nine days, most of it from the doctors, some of it my own observations.

Day 1, Sat, Oct 6:

[Collapsed at 3 plus in the afternoon and sent to SGH.
Was conscious at A&E.
Boon shouted "I can't breathe, I can't breathe" when oxygen mask momentarily removed in A&E. Doctors asked me to go out.]

[Consultant on duty Dr. S explained to Boon's mom and me that for this kind of attack] Usually immediate death upon arrest

Less than 10% chance of survival

Ecmo machine (life support) - 10 yrs ago did not exist

[Sent for CT scan at 5 something or 6. Result suggested that heart was too damaged by the attack; not possible to put in stent.]

Day 2, Sun, Oct 7:

Left main infarct (70 - 80% blockage of left ventricle) If blockage discovered before arrest, bypass would have resolved it.

Not diabetic. No high cholesterol. No hypertension.

Improvement

Nodded when Dr. S asked if he could hear. Organs ok.

Thrashed around in bed.
[Nurse said this was what the younger patients usually did. Because they want to get up, he said.]

Day 3, Mon, Oct 8:

Signs of pneumonia? Takes 24 - 48 hrs to manifest.

Echo scan of heart showed only 10 - 15% working.

Day 4, Tues, Oct 9:

Pneumonia.

Kidneys started failing. Passed a lot of urine but toxins not expelled. Dialysis started.

[Boon's mom and I] gowned up and went in. He teared [when we spoke to him].

Brain swelling due to ____? leading to damage

[Doctors and social worker talk to us about open heart surgery to implant a mechanical heart device the next day. Infection has to clear for operation to take place. And most of all, Boon has to regain consciousness and be able to respond to simple commands.]

Day 5, Wed, Oct 10:

Operation cancelled.

Head moving from side to side.

Face flinched when I said I was blinded by hate.

Day 6, Thurs, Oct 11:

Sedation turned off. Did not recover consciousness. Did not move all day.

[Brought mobile phone to his bedside to] let his father speak to him.

Day 7, Fri, Oct 12:

Moved head from side to side when Father Stephen Yin prayed for him, holding his hand. [I did not see this. Was at the food court with C and D.] Moved shoulders and head towards me when I said C said he would do anything for me.

Arrhythmia afternoon to night. Defibrillator used twice at least.

Day 8, Sat, Oct 13:

Heartbeat rhythm 90s and BP [blood pressure] 80s. - Peaceful day.

Dialysis machine changed. Catheter changed.

Day 9, Sun, Oct 14:

Steady decline in heartbeat rhythm and BP from morning.

Official time of death 2004hr.

(to be continued)

How To Live

noreply@blogger.com (wheyface) — Tue, 25 Jun 2013 09:47:00 +0000

Until we learn how to die, we won’t know how to live. It was Boon, my lover and my friend, who told me this. They were the words of some famous writer, he could not remember who. I thought I knew what was meant by those words. I am pretty sure Boon thought he understood their meaning too.

When we first met, we found that we shared an obsession about death. I told him from very early on that I thought about death every day. He said he was the same. Talking about such things made us feel we were wise beyond our years. To know how to live, one must first learn how to die. It seemed pretty clear – the words resonated with us because we had gained enough experience and knowledge of the world, and above all, human nature.

The prospect of death seemed remote enough. We were thirty-something’s with the usual aches and pains of thirty-something’s working in deskbound office environments in a fast-paced city. We exercised at least twice each week and we tried to eat properly. We talked about death as if it were different from exercise and diet, as if it were something abstract. It was in the “Not Yet” category, something to get to after we sort out other more pressing and immediate concerns like our careers and saving enough for retirement.

Of course we were aware that deaths happened around us every day. But our consciousness about this belonged to the same order of consciousness when hearing a news report about Syria or some troubled zone somewhere far away. We could shut our minds and hearts to what the poor innocent people in such places have to suffer and endure on a daily, yearly, basis, because our lives carry on in a painless groove in spite of our knowledge of their ordeal. Such was the reality of death to us.

Boon died nine days after a sudden heart attack on October 6, 2012. We had been together for almost a year, but in those eleven months I never ever heard him complain about breathlessness or pains or discomfort in the chest. He did not mention any family history. He used to say that longevity runs in his family, pointing out that his grandfather was in his nineties and his grandmother lived till her eighties. On our last holiday together to Penang in August, we walked everywhere, often at a brisk pace, and not once did I see him stop to catch his breath.

On the morning of October 6, I was working at home, doing some research for my novel. Boon went to the gym. Before he went out, I asked him if he would like to watch a Woody Allen film later that evening. When he came back from the gym, he was very cheerful and I told him how well he looked. We drove to Whampoa for lunch and then we went to Far East Plaza because I had errands to run. Whilst we were in town, he collapsed. It was in the late afternoon, at three something. He was sent to SGH in a Civil Defense ambulance. I sat in the front, next to the driver. I was by the pallet when he was placed on it and wheeled into A&E. He had regained consciousness and his eyes and mouth were open. He was saying something to me but I could not hear anything because the oxygen mask covered his mouth. Boon was moved to the Cardiac-Thoracic ICU at ten something that night. He never got up from his bed. He died on October 14.

Watching Boon struggle and then slip into irremediable decline in those nine days at the Cardiac-Thoracic ICU filled me with awe and fear. Awe and fear not so much at death, but at life. What a mystery life is – a gift bestowed for seemingly no reason, and when withdrawn, no reason furnished either.

October 2012 was when I realized that for all the books I had read about death and aging, for all our conversations about death, Boon and I were clueless. To be stricken and to sense the impending loss of his life, to be unable to speak about his pain and his fear, how lonely he must have felt.

In the A&E I remember saying to my friend Y who had rushed to the hospital after I called her: "Is he going to die just like that?" I felt utterly alone. In the A&E I prayed for the first time in a long while. When I prayed, I did not hear anything.

(to be continued)

By Way Of Starting

noreply@blogger.com (wheyface) — Mon, 24 Jun 2013 14:28:00 +0000

Perhaps one way is to start with my eyes. In late October 2012 I was thinking about possible distractions. I was wondering what I could do that would occupy me and not require the kind of concentration or mental focus that I would have been incapable of possessing at that time.

I recalled that it had been a while, possibly three years, since I went for a dental check-up. I also remembered a notice about an extensive eye test placed near the cashier of Paris Miki where I got my supply of daily disposable soft contact lenses, six months’ worth of lenses each time. I do not wear the contact lenses every day, and I only started going to this particular optical shop at 313 Somerset in 2011. I could not have seen the notice more than three times, but each time I found myself thinking that I should go for it, I should have my eyes rigorously checked. The dental appointment went smoothly. The eye test was a different story.

The Paris Miki optician did not understand why I wanted to do a perimetry test, but I was adamant. Still, when the test started, she must have soon realised something was not quite right. She had to prompt me, “The test has started, Wei Wei,” after I did not show any reaction at all to the sparks that were probably already appearing on the screen. And she went on to re-start the test two more times, repeating the instructions slowly each time before she started the machine. After the tests had ended, I asked her, heart in mouth, if the results were okay. “All over the place, Wei Wei,” she said in a rather subdued tone of voice, “the results are all over the place.”

The perimetry test results suggested that the peripheral vision in my right eye seemed abnormally deficient. The deterioration of peripheral vision pointed to glaucoma. I was aware that my maternal grandmother suffered from glaucoma, but I had thought this was to do with her diabetes. The optician said that perhaps the results were due to the sensitivity of the machine in her shop, so she made an appointment for my eyes to be tested a week later on a different perimetry machine in a specialist eye clinic. Again, the results were no good. The advice I was then given was to have my eyes tested again in six months’ time. It was only then, when I told my mother about the possibility of glaucoma, that she revealed that my aunt, her sister, was a sufferer. Much later on (just two days ago), I found out that my aunt had been using eye drops for twenty years.

Back in November I did not worry about what all this could possibly mean. Still, between November 2012 and June 2013 when I went for the second round of eye tests, I did consider at the back of my mind the possibility of glaucoma, the fate of becoming blind. A day or two before I went for the tests, I thought about Borges and I wondered how much of his library he had read before he became blind.

It is June 24, 2013, today. Last Tuesday I went to the Singapore National Eye Centre and had my eyes tested. The results showed that my right eye was afflicted with glaucoma, albeit early stage Open-Angle Glaucoma. I have since found out that this form of glaucoma accounts for at least 90% of all glaucoma cases. It develops slowly and is a lifelong condition without symptoms.

As I waited for two and a half hours to see the consultant, I did not know yet the full picture, but I suspected the prognosis. I did not know very much about glaucoma then (strangely, I did not look up anything about the disease until the day before the tests at the SNEC) but I knew from the optician at Paris Miki that it led to loss of sight.

I tried to think about leading my life without the ability to see. I asked myself if I would be able to adapt to this frightening development. I have always prided myself on my adaptability, but I could not fathom how I would cope without my eyes.

I love to look at things. Looking at leaves and trees and flowers; looking at the perfect symmetry of a cat’s face; looking at my dogs; looking at the people I love; looking at paintings; and most of all, looking at words . . . where would I be, who would I become, if simple acts of looking are to become impossible?

Waiting in the waiting room, I prayed and I asked God why he would let this happen to me, after all the other traumas of the past ten years. Why now when I had recently moved into my flat and was only just starting to feel again the possibility of happiness, whether it was at work, in my relationships with my family, in my friendships. Most of all, I had been ever so certain that God had granted me a new lease of life. Since the events of October 2012, my relationship with Him had been thoroughly transformed and I thought that surely, having freed me from my shame and self-hatred of the past five years, He would not put me through yet another trial. Surely not, o please, not me, not now.

Even though the damage to the optic nerve in the right eye is irreversible, glaucoma can be controlled through the daily application of prescribed eye drops. In three months’ time I will see the consultant at the SNEC again, I will do another round of tests, and hopefully the results will show that the condition in my right eye has not worsened. This will be the best piece of news one could hope and pray for, given the circumstances. And indeed I hope and pray that it will be my news in three months’ time.

Meanwhile, between now and then, I shall write and relate the events that took place in October and November 2012. Because:

When I think about why through the Holy Spirit God prompted me to have my eyes tested so that I could be saved from blindness, I believe that God has preserved my eyesight so that I can write and tell others about what I witnessed with my eyes. I witnessed His presence in October 2012 even though I had turned my back on Him and lived for quite some time as a spiritually blind person, and I did not think myself in any way in need of a cure for my blindness, so thoroughly convicted was I in my sense of self-mastery. There were times when I questioned the need for God to exist. Yet when my hour of need came, I called to Him and witnessed with my eyes His mercy, His grace, His love.

“I was blind but now I see,” goes the hymn. It is curious how this most worn of analogies, the metaphorical significance of seeing versus blindness, something that I thought myself very clever to have understood when I was eighteen and writing essays about King Lear, that this most common of literary figures of speech, should take on a thoroughly literal resonance for me now.

To relate the journey back to God that I went on in October and November 2012 -- I have been wondering where and how on earth to start. Perhaps one way is to start with my eyes; start by telling what it was that I was led to see in October and what happened next.

(to be continued)

new land

noreply@blogger.com (wheyface) — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 02:29:00 +0000

Until my early thirties, and apart from eight years in England, I had lived only in the eastern parts of this island. Then came a string of places - Upper Bukit Timah, Holland Village, Toa Payoh - all perfectly fine in their own ways. But I pined for the east and not recognising this, mistook my fickleness to new habitats for a chronic case of wanderlust.

I have moved back to the east now and I cannot even begin to say how this feels, how it feels to walk, drive, cycle through neighbourhoods that I have known since I was big enough to squat in a trishaw and accompany my grandmother and nanny to the Haig Road pasar.

Recent experience suggests though that I may have space in my heart for a new love.

Unexpectedly, over the last two weekends, I have come to know a new land - not new in the sense that I had not known it before, but new in that I am knowing it now in remarkable new ways. In this brief period of time, it has already become rather dear to me.

Tiong Bahru - meaning "the middle of the new"? Were you named thus when the walk-up apartment blocks that are now your most recognisable architecture were first built in the sixties? They were very much part of the new back then, embodiment of our youthful and newly postcolonial nation, these striking white buildings in the middle of a new city.

Walking on the pathways between blocks or in the corridors at dusk or on a Saturday late morning, looking up at balconies and peering through windows or glancing up the stairway to rest the eye on old fashioned metal door grilles - there is sometimes the smell of cooking from a kitchen, sometimes there is the sound of a pop song from a radio programme or the hum of voices from a television set. The names of roads not yet familiar and the weaving of alleys not yet inscribed into my mind - can you hear it in my voice? The pleasure, the delight, as I look, listen, and learn more about this new land - pure and intoxicating.

Perhaps because it is bestowed at this age -- when the spinning happiness and lightness of youthful infatuation have become as tired and revisitable as old tourist sites where nothing new can be added (except perhaps the softening of edges by the nostalgic misty eyes of a retrospective gaze) -- perhaps this is why my ardour for this new land gives me the feeling of having been returned to youth sans its heady, wild and reckless caprices and compulsions.

In his excellent book The Tao is Silent the witty and wise Raymond M. Smullyan writes: "freedom is doing what one likes; Zen is liking what one does." This leads me to see something which I shall commit myself to acknowledging by putting it here, in this public space, in words that shall outlast my flesh and bones and breath:

my approach towards novelty now (at two years shy of forty) compared to what it was from childhood up to age 35 seems to be guided by a Zen-like principle of liking what I do and not so much doing what I like.

This is a good place to be at. There is only so much time left; one really cannot afford to be squandering any more of it.

a grapefruit and a pomelo

noreply@blogger.com (wheyface) — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 01:07:00 +0000

The pomelo says to the grapefruit:
"You are the prettiest shade of pink,
exceeding even the raspberry and the dragonfruit.
Sharp yet unjaded,
you speak your mind with forthright ease,
handling each word with care."

The grapefruit says to the pomelo:
"Your nature,
well-hidden behind walls of toughened skin,
can be uncovered in segments.
When teased from the shell,
an architecture of bits, each one fiercely singular,
comes into the light
as sweet, sweet juice."

to continue

noreply@blogger.com (wheyface) — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 04:46:00 +0000

An sms exchange with my friend F a few evenings ago after I received news of my promotion -

Me: I've been promoted and my unit made autonomous.

F: Congrats! Now you will never finish your book.

Me: I don't think I can do anything but to continue.

F: Then better sleep early and wake up early to write!

[It was 11.05 at night.]

Me: Continue living I mean.

F has said before that he has low expectations of people. It would seem, though, that he has rather high expectations of me as a writer.

In an interview the pianist Mitsuko Uchida said: "There is no perfection. One works and if one is lucky, one discovers something every day. At a certain time one must have the courage to stop, and that's that."

Her statement is what I would say too, about how one might continue being a writer without renouncing all the other aspects that constitute one's sense of a full encompassing life.

Mitsuko Uchida also said: "If there is a heaven - I'm not a Christian - and if I arrive at the gate and they ask me what I am, all I will say is, 'Musician.'"

This immediately brought to mind something similar that J, a dear friend and former comrade-in-arms, used to pronounce firmly, her voice strong and steady, her beautiful big eyes serious, bright, wide: "I was born a composer. I live as a composer. When I am dead, I want to be remembered as a composer."

We were a jovial coterie, all of us practitioners and teachers in the arts - visual arts, music, theatre, literature - and J's earnest declaration (which she reiterated a number of times over three years) was something we admired but also poked fun at mercilessly to her face.

Yet today, when I ask myself what my profession at the gate of heaven is going to be, two words come to mind: "Reader. Writer."

And what I have come to understand is that for the second to emerge and to continue, to be buoyant, the first must always be like a furiously flowing river.

trunch

noreply@blogger.com (wheyface) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 13:10:00 +0000

Words are disappearing from the Oxford Concise Dictionary every year, I read in an article in the International Herald Tribune today. Words like growlery.

(Growlery: place to growl in, private room, den.)

Why should this word be removed? I should like to know. It is surely a mark of civilisation that every home should have a growlery in it. Where are we going to do all our growling now? Growling deserves a dedicated space.

Of course, to offer a balanced view, the IHT article also said that new words are being birthed each day, words like woot and sexting. I like too much what their sounds suggest to look their meanings up.

Actually, anyone can have a hand at making new words.

Yesterday I was having a cooked breakfast in a charming cafe perched on the side of a hillock at four o'clock in the afternoon. The waiter had asked as I entered the place if I was after brunch or dessert. Brunch, I said. Later on, after we had placed our orders, I coined the word "trunch" - it was tea time, I had not yet had lunch, and my friend was eager to have his first meal of the day.

If only there was time to trunch every other day! Am I not reasonable? It was a lovely lovely afternoon and afterwards the day just got better and better as the moon climbed higher and higher. With trunch to look forward to, the growlery would become a less needed space, and the word can be packed away in a box with tissue and mothballs together with breakfast, lunch, and supper.

Rashomoned

noreply@blogger.com (wheyface) — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 02:24:00 +0000

A party at a friend's apartment near Scotts Road to usher in the new year - it was December 2009.

Last night this event was called back to mind in the course of a conversation with the host, a friend who has stood by me and given me all kinds of support in the tumult of these recent five years.

Both her helpers had noted that my then husband, to be known henceforth as Hyena in this blog, gobbled down his food. "Not one, but two of them said this to me," said my friend.

"That was how he ate," I said. "He ate like that at home too."

"I didn't expect a commentary on dinner table etiquette from the helpers,"said my friend, "from both of them at that."

The image of my friend's helpers, two middle-aged women with worn hands, one from Indonesia, the other from Thailand, comparing notes on guests and table manners made me think of James Joyce's very long short story The Dead. To be exact, I was thinking that it could be written up as a scene for a similar sort of story to Joyce's - a naturalistic depiction of a slice of Singaporean society at a party.

To be reminded of that evening, and to be told how Hyena and myself in relation to him were perceived and discussed by others not related to us can be described as a Rashomon moment. Different perspectives from different persons of the same event.

Then again, there is also the question of what could then be admitted versus that which is freely admitted to now. The different perspective that comes to light now was hitherto perhaps not so much unknown as unacknowledged.

To my friend, I said in a light tone, "Do you remember Leonard Bast from Howards End? He was invited to tea at the Schlegels after he returned Helen's umbrella - she left it behind at a Beethoven recital. The Schlegels are these liberal upper middle class women who live in a townhouse, and have no financial worries. Leonard Bast was working class, someone who read the same books as they did, but came from a different world. He had never met or known people like the Schlegels before he was invited to Margaret and Helen's home."

Thinking back now, looking back at the relationships, observations recorded as if one were a camera and the inferences that followed did not lead to the most logical of choices. Emotional intelligence, perceptiveness and a strong analytic mind may not good judgment make. A certain casualness, or is it absence of caution, has also proven to be detrimental.

All this can fuel self-hating, or it can be channeled elsewhere to less harmful, less futile ends.