In Remembrance of My Loved Ones

 I lost two loved ones within half a year.

Until now, sometimes, I am in some form of denial. I imagine he's still living so tears won't flow. My nephew said the Chinese sinner's prayer with him. A pastor came and prayed for him and despite the pastor telling him he need not repeat after her, he did it voluntarily.

My faith is not as strong as I was when I was a teenager. Sometimes I even wonder if there's really heaven, and if he's up there.

I believe that God is kind and merciful. I believe He would grab at any chance to save his beloved children. I hope that I will go to heaven too. I would miss him so much I kept crying. I walked to the sofa and sat down and continued to cry. Then suddenly, I thought I saw, from the black-screen TV, the reflection of a figure sitting about one or two persons' space away from me! I turned my head to my left quickly, but there was no one there.

I lost him in December last year.

In June, I lost a dear friend to uterine cancer.

She just turned 40 then.

She was a very brave and optimistic lady. Always positive. Always encouraging. Never judging. Always understanding.

Singles tend to make the worst critics of parents. They would tell you 'if this is my child, I would ...' as if they are the most perfect parents in the world.

I can't resist and would say,"Wait till you have one first."

But my friend wasn't like that at all. She understood the challenges of parenthood.

She's a beautiful lady too. I am not being biased. Anyone I showed her picture to would say "she's pretty". She had a pair of large Eurasian eyes and porcelain skin. 

She's an extremely determined person. She shed her obese weight within a few months. Even when she was overweight, I knew she was beautiful. She dropped more than 20kg within months. Everybody was amazed by her transformation. How many of us often lament how fat we are but lack the perseverance to stick to the diet or exercise regime? Not her.

Her eyes were always smiling. I haven't seen a time when she was in a bad mood. I used to think that such optimism could not be genuine. We were both non-graduates earning a measly pay as trained teachers. How could anyone be happy all the time? But she never once complained about the long hours or the low wage. She just tendered her resignation and became a full-time tutor teaching every possible subject she could.

When she knew about the cancer 3 years ago, it was already at Stage 4B. I didn't have a clue. She never talked or posted about it on her Facebook. But I did notice that she didn't engage with my posts as often as she used to. I thought she had moved on to other friends as would many. I am not a sociable person and I hardly initiate contact or a meet-up so I don't have many social friends.

One day, she posted a tribute to a friend whom she lost to cancer. She reminisced about the time when they were doing chemotherapy at a clinic. I was shocked and asked a mutual friend about it.

She was surprised that I didn't know and shared that my friend had rushed herself to the hospital when large volumes of blood gushed out from under, and that was how she came to know that cancer cells had been ravaging her body.

She was a Buddhist and would discuss Buddhist philosophies at length and what she made sense of them. A few years ago, she went travelling in Europe. She came to an 800-year-old church and lay in the snow, telling God,"If you are real, take me home." I don't know what she went through, but she became a believer. 

She said, looking at the snowflakes around her, she felt that it was a miracle that each snowflake is unique in design. Her cancer did not make her disillusioned or bitter about why she was stricken with cancer after accepting Christ. Instead, she was ever more convinced that there must be a God who is behind the miraculous make-up of a human body!

Her parents also accepted Christ and were water-baptised with her shortly after.

Despite being in the final stage of her illness and feeling unwell, she came to my father's wake on the last day. She knew that I wouldn't have colleagues to drop by.

When I went to her wake, her mother told me she had asked her how to get to the wake venue.

At the crematorium at the final service, the pastor read out a letter she had left behind.

She assured everybody that she had had a fulfilling life doing what she loved - teaching and travelling, and she urged everybody not to feel sad that she had departed and left for the heavenly home. She asked that we remember her every evening when we see the beautiful sky before the sun sets, as her name suggests.

She is so sensitive, thoughtful and considerate to everybody around her, even after she's passed.

Tears welled up in my eyes when I followed the hearse. Her aged parents walked slowly behind it. How painful it is for parents to send their child on her final journey!

Even on her deathbed, she reminded her father to go to church.

She donated her limited edition Yamaha piano to the church so that the music produced by it would continue to bless the church and its congregation.

Less than a month later after my friend passed, I was walking home when a butterfly-like moth came and stuck itself to my dress!

I thought it would fly away as I walked but surprisingly, it didn't. It stuck to my dress for as long as I didn't remove it! I suddenly remembered how people would often mention the appearance of a moth at their loved ones' wake or after the funeral. Some believe that it's their loved one coming back to see them.

I brought the moth with a broken wing home and put it in a container with flour. I had googled 'food for moths' and it stated that moths eat flour. 

However, the moth didn't survive from whatever it was suffering from. I buried it using some dry leaves under a bush.

I wondered too if my loved ones had come in the form of a moth to visit me and to tell me everything's okay.