Lim Peh Ka Li Kong

death is a fact of life. physical and emotional death, there is no escape from its clutches. perhaps it is freedom that death should signify, instead, our conditioned perception takes death with morbid fear, the fear of the unknown. could it be that if we lose that fear, the fear of death, there is nothing left to fear and we will really attain freedom because we will not be subjected to the threats of death and we will kowtow no more to injustice and oppression?

my grandfather passed on today. another chapter of my life has ended. in the last 3 years, there had been a few chapters that ended quite abruptly by death. as for this chapter, i saw it coming for some time. my grandfather had been a living dead for more than 3 years. he became somewhat vegetated as old age took away his mobility and memory. without the mind, the body is just a shell. i remember the days of my childhood sitting on his lap as he smoked, much to the chagrin of my grandmother. he would take me and my cousins downstairs for play and we would always get ice-cream from this particular man on a bike. i still see this old man selling the same ice cream from time to time. my grandfather was a great portrait artist. even when i was young, i was amazed at how he could wield a pencil and draw portraits with such indelible likeness. my cousins and i were often his subjects. i used to try to emulate his drawing and failed miserably. he used to go chinatown then during the weekends and would return with traditional chinese biscuits which can only be found now at old kopitiams. i remember awaiting his return excitedly.

in a flash, with the news of his death sweeping over me, all these moments and memories came flooding in. images of those incidents are still quite vivid in my mind. my emotional attachment to him deteriorated over the years as i grew older and lived with my parents. he is a chapter in my life, a chapter of a book that is still being written. he may be gone physically but my memory of him keeps him alive. as this chapter comes to a halt, like many other chapters in my life, a new one is being written.

i bade him farewell. 16 August 2004.

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