Death

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Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life.

– Charles Frohman, American theatre manager

I used to be very afraid of death as a little girl. The not knowing where you go, and what happens, leaving behind everybody forever and never ever having the chance to see them again seemed so lonely and sad. So final and terrifying.

I used to sit and cry about it – I was only 5-6 and my mom used to try to console me but to no avail. “I don’t want to be buried underground far from all of you,” I would wail. And my family would sit and watch me and wonder what a strange girl I was for thinking such gloomy thoughts when all the other kids were playing outside and death was farthest from their minds.

But I was always an unusual kid. I am what they call an empath, I guess. Someone who feels deeply, so deeply that it becomes a burden, because you spend life feeling the pain of others too and living life through many lenses – yours, theirs and the collective of all. It gets tiring.

My father died when I was 20. It was the first death in my immediate family. I remember being calm and collected during the funeral, and even smiling and laughing at people who came to visit and pay their last respects – all the while wondering why I was not having the normal emotions of tears, sadness and grief I should have. They came a few weeks later, when I was alone in my room, far away in my hostel dormitory at University Malaya where I was a freshman.

Unbearable grief and profound sadness that I will never be able to see him again and grow old with him, that I will never be able to talk to him again, that I needed him as an anchor in my life and my life was like a rudderless ship now, floating on stormy seas and he was not there anymore and worse, heartbreaking guilt that I was never a good enough daughter.

I was gripped by anxiety that I did not show him enough love, or made him aware that I loved him or gave him assurances that he was a great dad. Like an old movie stuck in an ever looping reel, I would think back on various events where he would say kind things to me, like “My daughter is so beautiful” while stroking my hair as I sat and practised my maths and the teenage I would just roll my eyes and walk away.

That annoying teenager was also so full of herself, that when her dad would praise her academic skills to strangers like the kedai runcit guy, the mechanic down the street, and the neighbours, she would scold him for embarrassing her.

See also A Portrait of Pain

How much I wanted him back to stroke my hair and tell me I am pretty again. To go around telling everyone how proud he was of me. To be my rock in a stormy sea. I wanted closure.

I would have given everything at that point to see him just one more time. To hug him tightly and kiss him and tell him, “I love you Appa. I am so so so so sorry for being a daughter who could not show you the love and affection you should have been shown. I am so so sorry that you did not live to see even one grandchild. I am so sorry I did not have the opportunity to spoil you with things you loved but could not afford. I have the money now, but you are not there. And you sacrificed all the things you could have had for us.”

I look at death differently now. I know that death is not final, and so I am not afraid of it, or of losing someone dear in my life. Death is only death of the body, the physical vehicle that transports who we really are – the energetic being made up of frequency and vibrations, or what is called the soul. So, we never die, our souls are timeless and ageless. We come from one collective infinite consciousness, and though we have all different names for it, it is the same oneness.