Last week, I saw the last moments of 2 ladies who had seen 8 decades of the world in their own parts. One of them, I have only known for about a year or two while the other, since my birth. It’s definitely not the first funeral of a relative that I have to “go” through (my mum passed away about 9 years ago). Due to my family’s religion, I had to “perform” my last respects to my elder, one of which was to stay up whole night to watch over the coffin. I don’t mind all that actually. I had done more tedious ones before. It gave me a time off, to reflect my life so far.
Sad to say, it kinda looks like a family gathering which could be quite stressful at times. Seeing how well your peers do can sometimes put you under great pressure. There are so many things to ask for in life:marriage, child/children, career and health. When you are at certain level of these things, those who have been there, done that would be the next level of things. It seems like they expect me to catch up with them in no time. Anyway, it’s a good opportunity to keep check with what I do have and what I don’t.
It also acts as a motivator as well. It reminds me what I still have to fight for in life. Goals are clearer now. I know I am behind for some of these stuff but luckily I am ahead in some others. I begin to think life is pretty much like the computer games I played to kill time (or those online games in Facebook which my wife uses to compete with her friends). In some games I got to make the high scores and in some others I was beaten up badly. Of course, I enjoyed those that I can play well with and dreaded those that I can’t. But in life, sometimes, you don’t have the choice to play only the games you do well in. You are forced to play the losing games as well. Those who win all deserve to be there. For others like me, we try to keep afloat by winning more than we lose. Finally, there remain those who don’t take the games seriously. They just take the thrills of the game play and ignore the results. In the end, they would the bite of the results but they would keep better,detailed memories (all-time winners tend to forget their victories fast).
I can’t judge if the grandmas of mine and my wife’s had played theirs well. Results are however great. They had 4 generations in the family tree. I doubt I can achieve this myself. Probably I can live up to see my grandchildren but not their children.
They did not go alone. Typhoon Morakot, earthquakes in India and Japan and the virulent H1N1 flu had taken many others along. We might have misread the warning of the eclipse that had occurred not long ago. Old wisdom spoke of incoming catastrophes upon the sights of eclipse.
And now, I would like to pay my very last respects to them.
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