It’s never easy to let go of someone, especially when you know that it’s for forever.
There’s no knowing when Death will come and snatch a beloved from your midst. You can go to sleep one night and wake up bereft of someone you love.

When I was six, I lost my father. I was too young then to fully understand the implications of his death. But in the ensuing years, I realised that it made me different from other kids and that his passing left us for the poorer, both literally and metaphorically.

In my fourteenth year, I lost three extended family members in a year. It marked the darkest point of our lives, with the mourning seemingly endless. One would think that we would have been numbed by pain but no. If anything, the grief merely mounted with each loss.

I especially missed my granny - she had been the one to take care of me when nobody else could. She died just a day shy of her 80th birthday, a days we had intended to celebrate proudly and grandly. A few days after her passing, I had dreamt of her. In my haziness, I recalled her standing at the doorway of my home. I beckoned her to come in and offered to make her tea, something I used to do. But she declined and kept saying to me in Hainanese, “You must take care, you know? Take care.” I awoke with tears streaming down my cheeks.

This morning, I received word that a relative of mine had passed on. He was a ‘cousin’ of my mother’s, and he was more than 80 years of age. In recent months, his health had deteriorated and for a while, we had thought he was a goner for sure. But he fought bravely and eventually left the hospital. And so, I took it for granted that he would be around for a long time to come, simply because he had always been around.

He used to dote on my sister and I the most because we were unfortunate children who had lost their father. He had always been close to my mother and would phone her up often. Whenever I picked up his call, we would embark on an amusing chicken and duck conversation for his Mandarin was not terribly good and neither was my Hainanese. It was with him that I spouted my trademark “but hia bo but gong” (can understand but cannot speak).

When he was hospitalised, my cousin and I said that we would visit him but somehow, busy schedules and sheer forgetfulness got in the way. We never did. And now, the guilt is gnawing at me horribly because I feel as if I had let him down. I cannot recall the last time I had seen him. I’m crying because I know that I will never see him again, because I, the very person who should understand the nature of Mortality, had taken it for granted.

But I do know that even in death, the loving links that bind all of us together will never dissipate. Bodies may waste away and spirits may fade but love endures.

For we will never forget.

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