How To Live

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)