Wednesday, August 11, 2004
This was definitely not what i expected when i said i felt like something terrible would happen.
It was really weird…cos like, over the weekend, me and my parents were in Malaysia, taking advantage of the extended weekend, yadda…we got back Sunday night, which was when my mother found out that all through the weekend her whole family was trying to get her because one of her sisters (ie my aunt) who lived
in Malaysia had tried (unsuccessfully) to kill herself. So on Tuesday, all of them went back to visit her. Back on Tuesday night. And come Wednesday morning, at like 6 in the morning, the unsuccessful attempt, well, became successful.
Do I sound awfully callous? The whole previous paragraph sounded totally detached and unemotional. I mean, its my aunt, for Chrissakes. The thing is, it’s the first death that I’ve encountered that has actually had any sort of bearing on my life. Previously attended funerals (think
mother’s ex-classmate’s father in law types) don’t count, because they were sad, but only generally so. This is someone i
know.
I think i’m partly insulated because I saw her, but its still hard to believe that people i know
can actually die . My whole family’s pretty much in chaos now…and its especially horrible because it was a
suicide.
It must have been a pretty awful life…awful enough for her to choose to die, despite the pain and despite how frightening and creepy it had to be. If even death with all its connotations is preferable to life…I don’t know, i can’t imagine how bad everything must have been. It’s very haunting, the image of this desperate, lost soul, caught in between two inescapable hells, the living hell that she must struggle through each day, that can only be escaped by diving head first into a (possibly) darker and infinitely more inescapable one. If i was faced with these two alternatives, i doubt i would have the courage to do the latter. It takes a lot of courage to die. I think many of us would choose to
live with it , no matter how bad it got, rather than accept that we screwed up life so badly it might as well just end with a fullstop.
Would living a sort of half-life, drifting through existence like a shadow, be preferable to death? You know that thing that people always say…only with loss is there gain..i think its from one of deen’s blogs…well
what would anyone gain from such a death as this? . My mother says,
liberation .
She was apparent;y never really happy where she was, doing what she did. After the funeral and everything, she’s going to be cremated, and then the whole family’s driving back here to scatter the ashes into the sea.
because she loved to wonder i quote my grandmother.Sigh, its almost poetic and its almost beautiful, but its incredibly sad because it took a death to bring these into existence.
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