Friday, June 26, 2009

She is and now was a volunteer, at one of our centres. On the pretext of accompanying my colleagues, I sat at her wake and listened about her; her antics, her loud personality, her gregariousness, her helpfulness, then to her last week in the hospital, how she was all ready to return from a heart surgery, being the most active patient in the ward full of post-surgery patients, then a virus attack, CPR and her death at 3plus am. Then to how her friends helped wrap her body with 7 layers of her favourite clothes, remembering the things she liked, her love to sing karaoke, her jokes, picking on certain this and thats, finally to sealing up her coffin.

Aunties stroll into the wake ground; they are her friends. No big moving story behind their friendship; they did not lose limbs fighting wars together, probably only market-bantered and sang karaoke together. So aunty, so heartlandish. But these simplicities and the daily vicissitudes make the best memories, and also the hardest to forget. She was there yesterday, but not there tomorrow. Someone wished it was a mistake, and that she could knock on the top of her coffin and everyone'd be happy to pull her out, and a hope on how she could walk into our centre tomorrow, like every other day. Nothing morbid, just friends and their audacious hopes; the absurbness derived from the suddeness of her death.

Bluntly, on any other day, she would just be another auntie to me. But unexplanably, she caused me to cry tonight, and i cant really explain why. Human emotions are inexplicable and baffling. I cant really say i miss her. But maybe, i feel the world lost one good person today; and maybe, i realised that being simply ourselves, we have that power to make people cry. This auntie used this power well. She was her typcial self, yet she untypically impacts and heartlessly made us remember.