of blood and bones
i received some rather bad news today.
i started the afternoon planning spend what's left of my effective vacation watching Blood and Bones before i start work tomorrow. and on my way to cineleisure, i received an SMS from someone's who's apparantly not on my phonebook informing me that his/her father passed away this morning and provided the details for the wake arrangements. now u see, the number shown on my handphone was +659300XXXX so the person texting me could conceivably still be on my phonebook with his/her no being entered without the +65. So i scanned through my entire phonebook looking for people bearing that number but to no avail, so i replied to the message with sending my condolences and asking who it was. strangely, the number was not in use. so i went to cineleisure to collect my pre-booked tics. it wasn't until just before i entered the cinema did it hit upon me that the person who sent the SMS might in fact have used someone else's HP to inform his friends of the bereavement. so i decided to drop a call to Apocalips, a close friend of mine whose dad was terminally ill with colon cancer to check.
as it turns out, it was indeed him who sent the SMS. now this is the really weird part: Apocalips' number is 9388XXXX, but the sms showed the sender's number to be 9300XXXX. and it certainly wasn't a display error cos' i used the details from the SMS to call the sender which was indeed 9300XXXX. An error on the part of the service provider was perhaps the most likely explanation though it certainly feels kinda freaky given the nature of the message. Over the phone, Apocalips' sounded like he was trying overly hard to downplay the entire event by trying to sound indifferent while he related to me that his father committed suicide at home. it does was quite a shock for me, cos' i've actually met his father a couple of times when i went to his place. i wanted to give up the movie to meet him immediately but he was reluctant and tried to reassure me that he's fine and insisted that he wanted to be alone. and so i went on with the movie, feeling rather guilty about not rushing to meet him immediately and thus failing as a friend. there couldn't have been a better emotional build-up to that movie, which was coincidentally about an estranged family relationship centrering around Takeshi Kitano who plays an ultra-abusive father. I probably shouldn't describe too much on the movie, but all i can say is that it came across as a somewhat misogynistic flick depicting the typical Kitano-esque violence being inflicted on the various women who crossed paths with his character.
It was almost an allegory of Apocalips' relationship with his father. From what i knew, Apocalips had a rather estranged relationship with his dad as well, and it all started when his dad had a relationship with his maid when he was younger, and being the favourite son, Apocalips bore the brunt of the resentment his elder sister held against his father who took it out on Apocalips (A), verbally and even physically abusing him at times. And as he grew up, A too felt a sense of resentment towards his father to which his father retaliated with a whole barrage of condescension such as telling him to forget about a university education which will be wasted on him even when he clearly had the grades to qualify into a decent university.
After the movie, i called up A and insisted that i must pay him a visit and so i dropped by his place. A greeted me at the door and he seemed as though he was putting up a strong front speaking with a tinge of jaded indifference. I met his mother and his brother -who was playing DoTA in his room- and offered my condolences. I really didn't know what to say, except to tell him that his father is finally alleviated from his mortal suffering and that was at least something he should be happy about for his dad who was plagued by the immense pain from his cancer which spreaded to his liver and bladder. According to A, it wasn't the demise per se, as much as the manner which his father chose to end that was really traumatising. Apparantly, his father's condition had deterioriated significantly over the past few weeks and that he spoke sporadically about thoughts to end his life and alleviate the family from the burden of caring for him before becoming bedridden, which would have been an eventuality had he not committed suicide. A and family were rather concerned and so they actually took precaution by hiding the toxic stuff and locking up the doors and windows to prevent him from attempting suicide. But who would have guessed that he chose to hang himself off the vent at the store room instead. It must have been terribly traumatising for A's mom who was the first to discover the body when she woke up in the morning. As A describes, more than the demise itself, it was the terrible sight of seeing his father hanging there, that sense of helplessness that really saddened him.
If there was any consolation, A did somewhat reconcile with his father in the months preceding his death. He told me how they actually bonded by betting on EPL matches or how his father was on a roll winning money for the past few matches when he placed bets for his dad on Live Betting. He then jokingly related how just the previous night, his father wanted to place his bet on Man Utd for the Manchester derby and how fortunate it was that he didn't place the bet for his dad. In his own words ' 幸亏没帮他买.要不然连生命的最后一场赌注也输了...' It was perhaps a reference to his dad's previous investment losses which forced them to sell off their old apartment before it could go en bloc to settle his debts and medical expenses. A tried to steer the conversation into a more light hearted one, relating the cute aspects of his father such as when he insisted on drinking bottled bird's nest, or unagi soup even when he couldn't finish them all or how his family wanted to celebrate his birthday which was lamentedly tomorrow by buying him him red eggs and mee sua for breakfast. A laughed at himself relating these little mundane facts about his dad. And for the first time, i've saw someone, weeping in laughter. 笑着流泪.
it was an extremely heartwrenching sight.
it must have been a huge relief for him to pour out his tears instead of putting up the strong front which he must have felt pressured to upkeep in light of the indifference of his brother and mother.
so after that we went down the block to go to the coffeeshop. as we were walking around the estate, there's this fucking bitch who apparantly lives in A's block who walked towards our direction. Apparantly, according to A, that bitch saw the coroners going up the lift to the 12th storey and kinda knew what happened and she made no effort to disguise her intention of shielding her son and avoiding A as though he's some pariah while staring at him as though he's cursed or something. A reckons that the news probably would have spread around the block since the uncles whom he plays chess with downstairs were staring at him too.
Fucking brainless bitches. It's this sorta village kaypohs that make community living such a chore. and it's these gossip leaches that created institutions like Lianhe Wanbao or Xinmin Daily which make a living out off feeding the collective curiosities of these kaypoh cunts and providing a job for half-fucked dregs of the journalism circuit who would have otherwise have difficulty finding employment if not for their knack at becoming parparrazzi and drawing news -not outta celebrities mind you- from the next random person who flashes at his neighbour at home, or the next vegetable wholesaler cum paedophille who claims to have had consesual bondage with kids and din murder them. Good lord! Those conniving bastards actually created a whole FUCKING INDUSTRY outta gossipping.
ok. anyway, i really gotta stop here. first day at work tomorrow, mustn't be late. and i'll be going for the wake tomorrow too. and i just have to find out someway to inform the other bitch who changed her HP number and teaches at North Vista sec. i'll call her staff room if i have to.....
i started the afternoon planning spend what's left of my effective vacation watching Blood and Bones before i start work tomorrow. and on my way to cineleisure, i received an SMS from someone's who's apparantly not on my phonebook informing me that his/her father passed away this morning and provided the details for the wake arrangements. now u see, the number shown on my handphone was +659300XXXX so the person texting me could conceivably still be on my phonebook with his/her no being entered without the +65. So i scanned through my entire phonebook looking for people bearing that number but to no avail, so i replied to the message with sending my condolences and asking who it was. strangely, the number was not in use. so i went to cineleisure to collect my pre-booked tics. it wasn't until just before i entered the cinema did it hit upon me that the person who sent the SMS might in fact have used someone else's HP to inform his friends of the bereavement. so i decided to drop a call to Apocalips, a close friend of mine whose dad was terminally ill with colon cancer to check.
as it turns out, it was indeed him who sent the SMS. now this is the really weird part: Apocalips' number is 9388XXXX, but the sms showed the sender's number to be 9300XXXX. and it certainly wasn't a display error cos' i used the details from the SMS to call the sender which was indeed 9300XXXX. An error on the part of the service provider was perhaps the most likely explanation though it certainly feels kinda freaky given the nature of the message. Over the phone, Apocalips' sounded like he was trying overly hard to downplay the entire event by trying to sound indifferent while he related to me that his father committed suicide at home. it does was quite a shock for me, cos' i've actually met his father a couple of times when i went to his place. i wanted to give up the movie to meet him immediately but he was reluctant and tried to reassure me that he's fine and insisted that he wanted to be alone. and so i went on with the movie, feeling rather guilty about not rushing to meet him immediately and thus failing as a friend. there couldn't have been a better emotional build-up to that movie, which was coincidentally about an estranged family relationship centrering around Takeshi Kitano who plays an ultra-abusive father. I probably shouldn't describe too much on the movie, but all i can say is that it came across as a somewhat misogynistic flick depicting the typical Kitano-esque violence being inflicted on the various women who crossed paths with his character.
It was almost an allegory of Apocalips' relationship with his father. From what i knew, Apocalips had a rather estranged relationship with his dad as well, and it all started when his dad had a relationship with his maid when he was younger, and being the favourite son, Apocalips bore the brunt of the resentment his elder sister held against his father who took it out on Apocalips (A), verbally and even physically abusing him at times. And as he grew up, A too felt a sense of resentment towards his father to which his father retaliated with a whole barrage of condescension such as telling him to forget about a university education which will be wasted on him even when he clearly had the grades to qualify into a decent university.
After the movie, i called up A and insisted that i must pay him a visit and so i dropped by his place. A greeted me at the door and he seemed as though he was putting up a strong front speaking with a tinge of jaded indifference. I met his mother and his brother -who was playing DoTA in his room- and offered my condolences. I really didn't know what to say, except to tell him that his father is finally alleviated from his mortal suffering and that was at least something he should be happy about for his dad who was plagued by the immense pain from his cancer which spreaded to his liver and bladder. According to A, it wasn't the demise per se, as much as the manner which his father chose to end that was really traumatising. Apparantly, his father's condition had deterioriated significantly over the past few weeks and that he spoke sporadically about thoughts to end his life and alleviate the family from the burden of caring for him before becoming bedridden, which would have been an eventuality had he not committed suicide. A and family were rather concerned and so they actually took precaution by hiding the toxic stuff and locking up the doors and windows to prevent him from attempting suicide. But who would have guessed that he chose to hang himself off the vent at the store room instead. It must have been terribly traumatising for A's mom who was the first to discover the body when she woke up in the morning. As A describes, more than the demise itself, it was the terrible sight of seeing his father hanging there, that sense of helplessness that really saddened him.
If there was any consolation, A did somewhat reconcile with his father in the months preceding his death. He told me how they actually bonded by betting on EPL matches or how his father was on a roll winning money for the past few matches when he placed bets for his dad on Live Betting. He then jokingly related how just the previous night, his father wanted to place his bet on Man Utd for the Manchester derby and how fortunate it was that he didn't place the bet for his dad. In his own words ' 幸亏没帮他买.要不然连生命的最后一场赌注也输了...' It was perhaps a reference to his dad's previous investment losses which forced them to sell off their old apartment before it could go en bloc to settle his debts and medical expenses. A tried to steer the conversation into a more light hearted one, relating the cute aspects of his father such as when he insisted on drinking bottled bird's nest, or unagi soup even when he couldn't finish them all or how his family wanted to celebrate his birthday which was lamentedly tomorrow by buying him him red eggs and mee sua for breakfast. A laughed at himself relating these little mundane facts about his dad. And for the first time, i've saw someone, weeping in laughter. 笑着流泪.
it was an extremely heartwrenching sight.
it must have been a huge relief for him to pour out his tears instead of putting up the strong front which he must have felt pressured to upkeep in light of the indifference of his brother and mother.
so after that we went down the block to go to the coffeeshop. as we were walking around the estate, there's this fucking bitch who apparantly lives in A's block who walked towards our direction. Apparantly, according to A, that bitch saw the coroners going up the lift to the 12th storey and kinda knew what happened and she made no effort to disguise her intention of shielding her son and avoiding A as though he's some pariah while staring at him as though he's cursed or something. A reckons that the news probably would have spread around the block since the uncles whom he plays chess with downstairs were staring at him too.
Fucking brainless bitches. It's this sorta village kaypohs that make community living such a chore. and it's these gossip leaches that created institutions like Lianhe Wanbao or Xinmin Daily which make a living out off feeding the collective curiosities of these kaypoh cunts and providing a job for half-fucked dregs of the journalism circuit who would have otherwise have difficulty finding employment if not for their knack at becoming parparrazzi and drawing news -not outta celebrities mind you- from the next random person who flashes at his neighbour at home, or the next vegetable wholesaler cum paedophille who claims to have had consesual bondage with kids and din murder them. Good lord! Those conniving bastards actually created a whole FUCKING INDUSTRY outta gossipping.
ok. anyway, i really gotta stop here. first day at work tomorrow, mustn't be late. and i'll be going for the wake tomorrow too. and i just have to find out someway to inform the other bitch who changed her HP number and teaches at North Vista sec. i'll call her staff room if i have to.....
10 Comments:
i had a friend who committed suicide just a couple of years ago and he was staying a couple of blocks from me... one of my fren sent me a very curious sms about his demise but it was thru much difficulty that i uncovered how he died... really freaking... the dead man's family is still staying in the same apt, freaking... the husband and wife had problems and they were quarrelling the night before... the wife was the suspect of the whole problem
perhaps we will never understand what they're going through. death in any form, would be an alleviation to them.
i still can't fathom the sms thing. kinda freaky.
Oo-er. Was this the guy you were telling me about the other night?
Yup he was the one.
Good luck!
Not too sure how to react when I read this post. Too many feelings were swirling - so I think I shall try and see if I can pen them down.
First, the movie Blood and Bones. I watched it too...and the most disturbing image of the movie was not the abuses suffered by the women but the suicide of the narrator's sister. There were times in my life where I can see myself ending it all - because everywhere I turn to seem to be a hopeless dead end. My heart went cold at that particular scene....
Your friend's father - I can't say I understand how he felt, but I sure know how it feels to lose a kin. Mine left when I was 12, and till today I missed him badly still.
The thing that strikes me most abt this post is ur ability to emphatize, and verbalize it in print. Many times I feel a lot, but i can hardly put them into words for fear they could not adequately describe how i really really feel.
Laughing with tears.....only one who have done this will know the bittersweet feeling. Heartwrenching is indeed the word for this.
Kaypoh people aren't that bad. Until they start judging others whom they don't even know(and probably never will).
Frankly, I'm thinking that when someone is dying, he/she is not upset about it. The people around he/she are more upset about it. Not having died before, I cannot prove this.
ghost: Thanks, i need endurance more than luck to keep myself awake at work =)
elvina/SB: the death of hanaka really summed up the inequities of women in a male-chauvinistic society, from her father to her husband, there appears to be no avenue for emancipation at all. but the part of the movie that struck me the most was kitano's relationship with that widow mistress after she her brain surgery. it just leaves us wondering if she was the only woman he truly loved in the movie.
i guess we all fantasise about suicide at one point or another. perhaps, deep within, we all yearn to have the courage, to recklessly dispose our most precious asset in wasteful abondonment. suicide really seems rather appealing and cool at times, though we often overlook the hurt it brings to our loved ones.
Dun believe in those chinese tabloid papers.. they usually write crap and not real stuff.
'cuz I had a friend who committ suicide last year, the parents didn't even grant an interview and they could even write their 'comments'. I was totally disgusted.
The most dramatic thing was, my sister met this girl 2 hours before she committ suicide. No signs of it. My sister literally balmed herself for not holding her back after she learned this.
Life is really a weird process. Everyone lives and breathes the same air, yet the results are different.
I hope your friend feels better. It hurts a lot to lose someone, & the conflicting feeling of knowing the person has finally broke free, comforting but, it's always a secondary focus.
exactly! i was totally disgusted when the Wanbao ran the news of this couple who died in the carpark inside their cars. i mean, ppl dead already lor, they still happily anyhow 大做文章 and speculate about them having an illicit relationship when the guy was already married with a kid. imagine how hurt his wife would have felt. they totally fuck care her.
my fren seems alright now, he's trying to immerse himself with all the studies to take his mind off it i think. in fact, he went back to uni 2 days after the incident which is one day before his father 'go out of the mountain'.
it must have been terrible for your sister. even when my aunt passed away, some part of me still feel the guilt of not having done all that i could to spend more time with her, so i could imagine how much worse it was for ur sis.
i'm working at UOB Plaza 1 now. Which building u working at? haha, i had a culture shock with the raffles place lunch-time culture. especially the newspaper/tissue chop seat system...
Post a Comment
<< Home