Dear Boon

 [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

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)

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)

Trust

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

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)

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 Remoteness Of Heaven

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

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

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)