I MET A PLUCKY GIRL yesterday and discovered anew the meaning of stubborn, cheerful, infectious living in the midst of physical affliction. It was in a chrome and concrete hospital building complete with a cavernous underground carpark, food court, Starbuck cafe, glass-menagerie shops and smart signage, so that the whole setup looks like a mall than a place where sick and dying people congregate.
When I reached the ward on the seventh floor, I saw her in bed, surrounded by her mother, relatives and friends. She is lucky to have such a cluster of people who care and love her. At the end of our lives, all that matters is not wealth, office work or reputation, but the enveloping presence of family, faithful friends and love ones.
After being battered by this rare illness for five years, she says she has learnt a simple message: that every happening in life, her life in particular, serves a higher purpose. Our suffering and misfortune make us better individuals, build character and bring us closer to God.
We may not be aware of God in our lives, just as we can't see the wind but we know the wind is there when we see a grain of sand being tossed about. Perhaps, she's the wind-tossed sand to show us -- cynical unbelieving bystanders -- God's presence.
Her confidence and poise spring to mind an old hymn (and two lines I surreptiously inserted as tribute):
In the whispering grassI hear Him passIn your lovely faceI feel His grace,God speaks to me everywhere.But then in an unguarded moment of weariness, she adds: "I wish to wake up just one morning as a perfectly healthy person, able to do anything I want." All young people are entitled to the fun and activities of a healthy life -- to run in the sun, to scuba-dive in a rainbow sea, to climb tall mountains, to travel to romantic lands. But not all young people can do the things they're entitled. With the constant companionship of this auto-immunological affliction, she belongs to the latter group.
She has accepted her fate and acclimatised herself to accept life one day at a time. But then, the day is so long, and the spirit is faint and the body is not strong.
When health is good, when companions are laughing, when work brings an adequate income, it is easy to say, I will live one day at a time, to smell the flowers, to savour the moment and not to be burdened by tomorrow.
But it is dispiriting and tiring to have to actually live by that formula of one day at a time for the next twenty years, forty years or more, fighting an invisible enemy, not knowing when one's body would turn treacherous and one has to return again to hospital for tests and more treatment.
We are not afraid or reluctant to face death, only we want it to come at our own choosing, and under our own terms. But illness, accident, death, hit us at a most inconvenient time.
Because I could not stop for Death,He kindly stopped for me;The carriage held but just ourselvesAnd Immortality.We slowly drove, he knew no haste,And I had put awayMy labour, and my leisure too,For his civility.Since then 'tis centuries; but eachFeels shorter than the dayI first surmised the horses' headsWere toward eternity.Why can't I go on living, forever and a day? Why can't I, like Emily Dickinson, not stop for death?
I want to wake up in the morning to sip hot java and munch toast kaya bread, to go to the office, step into my cosy cubicle (and pretend to work), to break for lunch with garrulous colleagues, and at the burnt end of day, to drive home under a crescent moon, for dinner, a good book and soft pillows and loving arms.
But life is not always so indulging nor so companionable. Unexpectedly, we lose our loved ones, the good times fade and regrets overwhelm us.
In the greater part of my five decades, there have been many missing parts in the jigsaw of my existence. I miss my mother who perished in cancer when I was barely an adult. I miss my father who was the light of my boyhood. I miss my granny who gave me an active social life when as a kid I followed her to the cinema, Guanyin Bodhisattva's birthday festivities, fairgrounds and other strange and wonderland places. Even now, I would gladly give up the rest of my lifespan for one day where I can have all three of them alive and well with me.
She may be dressed in baggy lime-green hospital pyjamas but my friend the plucky girl is so lucky -- she still has her good cheer, her courage and the comfort of her circle of love. And she still has a whole life ahead of her -- even if it means having to live one day at a time.
-- Francis Chin, Tan Tock Seng Hospital, Oct 23, 2001
Living one day at a time
But the day is so long
And the soul is not strong
