The Kindness of Strangers

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)