Mourning

I had been reflecting that New York gives you a lot to reflect upon and very little time to reflect upon it, while Singapore's main drawback may well be that it gives you very little to reflect upon but a lot of time with which to reflect. Such is the recipe for boredom. But in fits and starts, Singapore can be like New York in this respect as well. When things happen, action tends to negate reflection.

Many things have changed, and my return to Singapore a week ago seems like someone else's life, or a long time ago. We are into the third day of mourning for my uncle, who passed away in the ICU a bit before noon on the last day of 2008. What can you do, in the face of something like this? You try your best to help him, and when your best proves to be insufficient, you have to continue trying your best to help the people that have been left behind: his family - my family - myself, even. You involuntarily carry on, and because involuntary actions work best under normal circumstances and also tend to produce normal circumstances, you try to carry on as normally as possible.

All told, from the onset of the stroke till today, it has only been three weeks: not enough time to get used to it, not enough time to even properly accept that something as monumental as this has actually happened. Added to the almost instinctive reversion to as much normalcy as is tenable, this gives rise to a dazed mental state; you are aware of your going through certain motions, accomplishing rites and extending hospitality to the people who are visiting the wake, but you don't think about why you're doing it. You don't think about the recent death, or the body lying in state, or the beaming pictures that are posted in the obituaries or at the head of the altar. It's almost as if there were some other event going on: a block party, a family reunion. Even in the midst of the ceremonies of mourning, you find yourself more concerned with performing the rites well and saying the right things at the right time, rather than thinking about what has just happened. I guess when things change so fast, you only have time to appreciate the superficialities; reflectiveness only percolates to deeper levels over time.

But there are breathless moments of crushing awareness. Strangely enough, these don't come when I look on the body, which has ceased to be a person but is like a monument, an alabaster cast memorialising a life. The face has already ceased to be familiar; it is the animation that I recognise, more than the physical features, and so it is easier to look upon the body because it has become distanced from what I remember. But when confronted with signs of the past, the moments of anguish come. The strongest moments surface when looking at his obituary photograph. Or when my cousins speak of their father, speculating on what he would have done if he could have intervened in how his own funeral is organised. At moments like these, the dazed, automatic actions take on an awful frenzy, a sharp edge of desperation, like when you're walking down a street absentmindedly and thn become aware of someone yo don't want to meet, and you try to continue walking past as if you hadn't noticed, but your steps have taken on a bite of urgency.

And so, our consciousnesses skirt around the issue, stepping delicately. I think partly it is because each of us doesn't think anyone else wants to discuss it, and certainly I think that it is better for all our states of mind if no one decides to bring up the issue to my aunt and cousins. Silence and avoidance is a sign of consideration and deference. But at the same time, the ennui and trivia of organising a wake also keep us busy enough to avoid thinking about it. There are elaborate rules: the big joss stick and oil lamps that must be kept burning at all times; the provision of appropriate food for each meal for the deceased; the hourly burnt paper offerings; the ritual bowing when people come to offer their respects. And then there are the pure logistics: the seating of guests and the provision of refreshments, restaurant-style; the collection of baijing, community contributions to defray the costs of the funeral; the scrutiny of expenses incurred and the regular banking in of baijing income; the struggles with insurance forms and red tape. And just in case we have any spare time on top of that, there are always bags of paper offerings to fold, repetitive origami tasks creating wads of afterlife currency that are engaging enough to be distracting but not so strenuous as to be tiring. Putting on a traditional funeral like this is really an exercise in self-distraction, and the traditions give the family a structure to follow at the very time when they are most at a loss, to tide them over the most awful immediate aftermath of bereavement.

Some of it is actually so banal as to be absurd, and there are moments when everyone's placidity and calmness is downright unsettling. The awareness of the absurdity comes on the brink of apprehension of the enormity of what has happened. As you approach the fact of death, things start to look trivial, and there comes a point when people's lack of concern over death looks like lunacy, self-delusion. And maybe it is. But it is therapeutic, and it is what is the best for people on the brink of grief - no, not on the brink but in the thick of it, for everyone is hurting, you can be sure of that.

Such, then, is the paraphenalia of passing on. There are two more days of this; the funeral is scheduled to take place on Sunday, and then the straight, clear path of the traditional funeral gives way to a much less well-defined road to recovery. There are, of course, rituals that need to be carried out up to a year after the death, but they are few and far between, no longer all-consuming. And what happens when we are faced with the inescapable fact of the death? How, for example, do you deal with bereavement that has happened so suddenly, and carry the risk of sudden departure as you yourself depart to a place thirteen timezones away? This is the worst-case scenario for anyone who is away from home. More intimately, how do you deal with the loss of someone from your own generation, the first death in the rank of the family that is just above yours, the rank of your own parents? How do you live with the loss of a parent? And still, how do you deal with the loss of a sibling? The most awful of all: how do you accept the loss of a child? Recovery is neither simple nor inevitable.

I expect that the worst moment will be at the point of cremation, when, at last, there is no more space in which to procrastinate the expression of one's grief, and as the flames transmute the physical monument, I expect that we will all feel the anguish burning in ourselves. That is the point when philosophising fails, and you cannot take the long view because something near and intimate is being lost for good. Sure, we may whine about how life is only smoke and flames and ashes - but at that point, you really appreciate what it means, and the immediacy of it, the weight of it, the inescapable substantiality of it, will overwhelm your pretensions to detachment.

*

At monumental moments, when you're aware that you are in the midst of creating a milestone in your own life, there is a tendency to philosophise, to enshrine the moment in platitudes and to emphasise the glory for one's own pleasure. But this is not just any death, and this is not just any theoretical scenario. It is hard for me to find the right words, but I think - no, feel - that I must write this down, for some purpose that is obscure now but which, I trust, will become clearer in the future.

On the last day of 2008, my uncle passed away. He was a conscientious man, a good father, sometimes strict and demanding, accepting nothing less than full effort. He was assertive, which made him a good businessman. And he was witty, cutting through pretensions, making you question your own achievements to see whether they really were substantial before you try to hoodwink him with it. He was formidable; I myself never got over a certain fear of talking to him, because I did not feel I could hold my own against his intellect. He did not accommodate weakness, and he complimented sparingly, but whenever you did get some praise out of him, you knew it was given sincerely. He was not my age; I did not speak to him enough; but I liked him, and I cannot remove him from my memories. He loved his family; he loved us; he loved me. And we loved him well.

How else can I put it? I have lost a member of my family; we all have lost a member of our family. And we grieve, together or in our own ways; but we all grieve.