Lack of Grief

Earlier this week, I had to deal with a death in the family… my aunt (my dad’s younger sister) passed away. She’s been sick for quite a while, so her passing wasn’t a surprised at all. I did get a chance to visit her in the hospital a few days before it happened, and it didn’t look good. I won’t go into the details out of respect for the family.

What I am going to talk about is how I feel about death… here it is… I feel nothing. I do admit that it’s sort of weird… ok, it’s more than weird… I noticed this many years ago. Whenever there was a death in the family, I didn’t feel the usual grief. At that time, my uncle (my dad’s elder brother) passed away.

It wasn’t like I didn’t care about him or he didn’t care about me. In fact, he was quite nice to me. I remember the first time my parents went for their Hajj. He was the first of my relatives to call and check up on me to make sure I was doing ok, since it was the first time I was going to be home alone for an extended amount of time.

But losing a caring uncle didn’t do anything to me… I thought back about when I lost my maternal grandfather, and then my paternal grandmother… again, nothing… since then, there have been a few more deaths in the family, without any emotional effect on me.

This makes it impossible for me to relate to a friend who has suffered a lost… when one tells me that they have lost a loved one, I take a lot of time trying to figure out the right words to console them, since I have never had the need for such words.

I know it’s weird… most people would agree it’s weird… well, only one person doesn’t think it’s weird… one of my friends say that it’s a good thing… that I accept death as part of life… that death is expected. I sort of agree with that…. But I would like to add the fact that, yes, death is expected… so you make the most of the time you have with those you love and care for.

To tell you the truth, this time around, things were a bit different. I’m not saying I’m totally cured of my insensitivity… but my aunt’s passing got me thinking.

You see, my aunt was a very nice person… in fact, I can’t think of a single incident in my whole entire life when she was not a nice, polite and caring person… I used to spend quite a lot of time at her house when I was younger, so I would say that I had a front row seat. Her kids all loved her, and spent a lot of time with her, even though they all have their own families now. They were all calm when she passed… I’m guessing it’s because they have no regrets about their relationship with their mother.

So back to what I was thinking… have I made sure that I won’t have any regrets when a loved one passes?

As I’ve written before in a previous post, I’m not exactly the poster boy for the concept of “a good son”… but I’m not just talking about my parents. This is about every relationship you have in your life… your immediate family and beyond…

Could I safely say that I can maintain this indifference towards death in the future? I doubt I can… to not feel grief would be a possibility… but to not feel remorse, now that’s going to be a challenge…

I'm not going to commit to a plan or anything... it's just something that needs to be pondered... and when the time comes, I hope I can do something about it...

Movin' Along

Bali was awesome!!

Wait up… did I mentioned the fact that I was going to Bali? Well, if I didn’t, then let me just tell you that… well… I went to Bali recently. (Thank you, Captain Obvious.)

We had a tour guide cum driver that made things much easier… seriously, I would have just gotten lost. All the roads look the same.

We did the whole t

ourist thing… visiting temples and landmarks… it was really lots of fun… for those who are on my Facebook, have a look at the pictures…

Anyway, one place that he took us to was the place where they shot “Eat, Pray, Love”. Well, we just had a look at it from on top of a hill. Ketut Liyer’s house is somewhere behind the yellow building in the picture… we didn’t actually go down because we had other places to see…

While I was looking at the place, it reminded me of the book… To tell you the truth, I’ve only attempted to read the book… I have the DVD, but never got around to watching it. The reason is, the story (the beginning part of it, at least) is so extremely depressing!

You see, Elizabeth went through a tough time in her life. She then went on this journey and wrote a book about it… for the book to have meaning, she would have to tell the reader what happened in her life. It’s not to say that everything mirrored my own life, but I could really relate to it.

There are events in my life that I’ve gone through which I would consider being a closed case… I’ve moved on, so to speak. But when I read the book, I started to relate the story to those same ‘closed cases’… and I ended up reopening those cases.

If they were happy memories, then I won’t mind a single bit. But these are things that I tried very hard at the time to move on from… and I thought I did. It turns out that I just merely forgot about it… focused my attention elsewhere. Those sad memories are still there, locked up in a little box at the back of my mind.

Now this got me thinking… have I ever actually moved on when a problem hits me? Or do I just forget? Is there even a difference?

I would have to say that to ‘move on’, you would have to be able to talk about the subject without feeling sad, depressed, remorse, etc… And I believe I can do that for most things from my past… but there are some things which continue to haunt me ‘till now…

Now don’t get me wrong… I don’t lose sleep over these things… it’s just that if it was ever brought up, then I would probably spend a good one week going over it again and again in my mind… then I forget… again.

I guess there are some skeletons that just remain in the closet your entire life… you have to gather enough strength to bring them out and bury them…

Got a shovel I can borrow?