Continuing

A big thank you to everyone who sent their concerns and thoughts and prayers. Every little bit helps, and definitely I and my family are heartened by your support. There were difficult moments in the last few weeks. But for me, personally, I do think that the worst is over. The situation is greatly different for my cousins and aunt and my uncle's siblings, of course. The priority now is to support them, to help them to continue onwards.

As for myself, there hasn't really been many lasting effects, but the real impact has been to drive home the one great fear of people who are far away from home: that something drastic may happen when you're away. That, I think, is my greatest fear now: that I won't be able to be present when another crisis strikes, though heaven forbid that it happens again. It has never really occurred to me; usually, I think that the person most at risk when going away is the person that is departing. But it is clear, now, that simply being at home doesn't reduce the risk of some things happening, just as going abroad doesn't increase the risk of some types of occurrences. The difficulty, then, lies not in where you are, but the distance between you and your loved ones.

*

We carried out the funeral on Sunday, going through an elaborate Taoist ritual that saw us circling the coffin, bowing to it, strewing it with flowers, and then embarking on a noisy procession through the housing estate, complete with blaring band and talismanic papers tossed liberally into the air. We tried to keep up as the rituals progressed, at points threatening to leave us behind; our sadness and pain was mixed with a measure of bewilderment that served to give the situation a tinge of absurdity. We understood so little of it - the ritual's meaning was the province of a different generation - but the only hope, as always, is that we are doing good by our family member.

Actually, before we knew what was going on, the cremation was already over. It was very fast: a group of duty monks reciting the scriptures with the lacklustre over-familiarity of extended habit, a robotic lifter that raised the coffin to a space-age door, and at the press of a button, the metallic portal slid open noiselessly, the robot pushed the coffin into the dark space beyond, and then - a flash of flames, and the door sliding back into place as the flowers covering the coffin started to burn. And that was all there was to it: it was over in five minutes, barely enough time to register that the ritual has started, and certainly not enough time to appreciate that this is really the end.

It strikes me as somewhat sad, aven outrageous, that the end of a life, the end of a funeral, can go so smoothly with factory precision and industrial-strength equipment. Some things in life cannot be done quickly; certainly the value of some things should not be measured in terms of how efficiently it can be done. It is somehow wrong to end life as a piece of cargo handled by an industrial machine. There has to be a better way to do this: perhaps not as efficiently, but certainly a better way, whatever that may mean to the individual.

We went back later to the crematorium to collect the remains. I had imagined that the transmutation of the body by the flame would produce a fine dust. "Ashes to ashes", as it were. What really happened, though, was that everything combustible had been vapourised (the undertaker tells us that in the cremation chamber, a total of fifteen jets of gas flame are whipped up by a tornado of winds to engulf the body), and all that remained were broken bone fragments, completely dessicated. Everything soft had been reduced to nothing but hardness. And yet, there was something about the broken fragments that still seemed irreducibly human, and therefore inviolable. There are some things, secret things, about the human body that should not be seen, and setting eyes upon a skeleton strikes me as somehow being a desecration. It's strange: on the one hand, you objectively recognise that the bone fragments do not make up a person, and that after all, the person you knew departed long before the body entered the coffin. But as the crematorium attendant dug through the mound of bones with his bare hands, sorting out the skull pieces from the rest so that tey can be placed symbolically on top of the rest of the bones in the urn, a part of me was disgusted, outraged even.

But beyond the technicalites of burial, the main concern has been to sort out my uncle's affairs. No one had prepared for his possible departure, and looking through his things is to see a life that has been put on hold, work that was stopped for the night, seemingly still waiting to be resumed the next morning. And it quickly became clear that no one could decode his work to the level that is needed to duplicate it and replace him. At this point, I feel the most useless and helpless, because as our family grappled with his workplans, documents, finances and records, I could hardly make heads or tails of it. I was so completely out of my league. And it raises a fact that really depresses me: while I am still fiddling around in school, mulling over next week's homework, my cousins will already be planning to take over a family business. It is deeply humbling; it makes the current endeavour in Columbia look like vanity and self-indulgence. Definitely, my own work doesn't matter in the same way that my cousins' efforts matter.

As they looked through the material left behind by my uncle, they frequently remarked on how remarkable his abilities were, abilities that had not been so obvious while he was alive because he didn't make a big deal out of them, but that are immediately apparent from his intricate designs, complex spreadsheets and cryptic workflow. But of course, the documents are not simply lists of numbers, diagrams and words; on a certain level, there is no escaping the fact that these are among the last traces of a person who departed all too suddenly. How do you deal with that? How do you plumb these papers for objective data, and rationalise what you are doing against the personal significance of your own memories of the person who produced these papers?

It is deeply unfair, that I have the option of removing myself from this situation, simply by flying back to New York on the 15th, while my family has no choice but to continue dealing with the fallout from this death. And the thing is that no one really wants me to stay; indeed, they want me to go back because that is where I can make the most difference. It makes me feel even more conflicted, because I feel like I should be where I can make the most difference to them, rather than simply where I can make the most difference. Frustration comes in when I realise that I cannot make much of a difference to them at all. And that's where second-guessing comes in, that I should have lived my life in such a way that would have prepared me for this worst-case scenario. I guess, in a way, because no one can find a reason to blame me for departing again, I feel obliged to blme myself.

This in itself is not a bad thing, I think; self-doubt nurtures healthy humility. We live and learn. Most importantly, we learn while living. I guess that must continue to be a guiding principle; to learn something useful, to make myself useful to others. And self-doubt can help here, by making sure that I don't settle simply for enjoying myself or for passing the time. Productivity is not enough. The lot of others must also be helped.

*

Anyway, the struggle to return to normalcy has begun. School has started or is about to start, people are returning to work, and I contemplate my flight back to New York. But even in this period, there have been moments of normalcy, brilliant for their being so familiar in the novel context of an ongoing family emergency.

On December 30th, met Kats for dinner in Little India, and we randomly ran into Ms. C, our old literature teacher from CHS and a colleague from when I was teaching there early in 2008. It was quite spooky; we were walking along the street looking for a particular restaurant for dinner, and I suddenly spotted her in the window of a large Indian place. We went in, were introduced, and chatted for a while, exchanging festive greetings and status reports about our lives overseas. What made it even spookier was that I was still reading, at that time, Paul Theroux's Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, and Ms. C and her husband were mentioned in there. I thought of taking the book out of my bag to show them, but it struck me as inappropriate.

And after a large Indian dinner, we went down to Clarke Quay, and walking randomly along, we bumped into K, V and CH, who just happened to be heading in the opposite direction. I had not even realised that K and V were back in town! The whole troupe of us went back to Robertson Quay, and over cheap Tuesday liquor, had a conversation like the old times: philosophical wanderings, local politics, heavy issues interspersed with the wry and deadpan humour that I always remember as part of secondary-school life. It was good to find these old friends again, and to simply sit and talk, nursing drinks under the open night sky, in warmth and comfort.

And then, yesterday, took a very long bike ride around the Eastern part of the island with G. We followed a path that was even longer than the one that I had done previously with, coincidentally, another G: starting from Simei, we went down to East Coast Park, stopping at the hawker centre near Bedok Jetty for lunch. Then, we rode all the way up to the Eastern end of East Coast Park, and found a pretty little cove at the mouth of a canal near the airport, where we soaked our feet for a while and I mused about how this little cove is charming not because it is comfortable (like the huge beaches of Australia's Gold Coast or Staten Island's Atlantic shore) but because it is secluded and devoid of people (except for a couple of distant fishermen on the opposite shore of the cove). And then, tracing our way along the runway of the airport and chasing taxiing jetliners, we ended up at Changi Village for tea: mainly sweet stuff, to restore our energy. Then, we made our way via Loyang and Tampines, familiar territory both, to come back to Simei.

The ride itself was imensely pleasant: long, smooth paths, the warmth of the sunshine, the scenery that surprised me for being so beautiful (I have never really thought of Singaporean naturescapes as remarkable), good food. But it was made even more enjoyable by the good company; and as always, an experience that is shared is rendered more real, more palpable by its sharing. And I am again struck by how lucky I have been in terms of the people that I have met. Her personality reminds me of PM, while her gameliness and ability to keep up reminds me strongly of YS.

But of course, people like Joel, Conan, the old gang, YS, PM, Yvonne, K and the rest are not the sort that are likely to be common, and I daresay G will also be her own person, giving rise to a friendship that will be different from all that have preceded it, but that will prove nonetheless to be equally valuable. And not to mention WL and YR, who are still weathering frozen New York. I wonder what they're doing now. I hope they're still having fun.