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 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) 

 

Change

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)

 

Grief At First, At Last

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)