death and its celebrations

there is always something selfish about death. i realise that i do love chinese pomp and celebration and ceremony -the gaudyness of it i tolerate- because it is primarily focused on relationships between people. and that is always a good thing. i like the chinese new year visiting customs, the angbaos of course, n sometimes even the redundant orange swapping exercise. mooncake festival i LOVE. the lanterns and mooncakes and moon. dumpling festival is always an excuse to eat. but the only, only ceremony that betrays it all is the ceremony of death. i may sound harsh to say this, but the idea of hiring mourners to make the loudest noise so that it appears that the deceased is grieved is just a mockery. a mockery of human emotion, a mockery of sincerity, a mockery of death? Grief, at its most fundamental, is always solitary. It is steeped in silence, in an attempt to shut out pretensions, yet it is inwardly clamorous, because the voices of the past clatter to be heard and relived.
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this is what i wrote during my great grandmother's funeral, on a torn scrap of newspaper. i sat in one of those red plastic chairs, at the white plastic covered tables, and scribbled hard. it is long, because there were many words screaming to be heard amidst the dead silence, words which writing express best when speech fails me.


"Funerals are a corporate waiting. Every one is waiting for something to happen, someone to do something oher than what everyone is doing, someone to start talking, someone to dish out the poker cards or do what we are supposed to do at funerals. Reminisce about the past and the person? But reminiscence is a thread that links the present to the past, so what do you do if the past did not exist, and there is nothing for the thread to hang to? The bitter thing, the ironic thing, the strange thing is, i guess, I do not know her. I never did.


No one even tries to look pitiful anymore; it is tiring to keep up appearances. We stare blankly with a diluted smile reigning on our lips, a contorted show of interest, or at least non-indifference.


...the funeral troopers marched in gaudy and pompous, white shining uniforms with red-laced hems and bouncing black cowboy hat with pink fluffed edges. they made a din. A din that sounded more celebratory than disconsolate.


A funeral lasts so long, too long. In its entirety of three sleepless days, that no one could have the energy to cry or mourn, much less publicly and outwardly, even if it was genuine. i feel like a cheat, along with the rest of my relatives, for making such a din of mourning when i am empty inside with nothing to show, empty of emotion, empty of memories of her, empty of affections towards those seated in the red chairs around me.
"i miss you, even though i do not know you. i am sure i would miss you if i did."


the funeral band is as bored of us as we are of them. all of us are sweating ceaselessly, and as noise permeates and squeezes into our consciousness it only gets warmer. The band leader puffs on his glossy tobacco pipe, the band members in their space trooper uniforms look distracted, the lopsided smiles of the shocking pink-and-yellow clad band girls all whisper in thundering tones: This is a Farce. The cherry on top of the cake are the funeral cheerleader girls in mini-skirts, cheering on the dead at the expense of the cringing living."

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death aside though, i am not depressed. in fact these days i have been feeling quite blessed. :) its just that i dug up the torn newspaper scrap from that time. it is a fine line between fiction and reality. writers exploit that subtle divide.