How Fragile We Are...

The Malaysian state of Sabah is one of the most beautiful and diverse places in Malaysia. It has miles of sandy beaches surrounded by crystal clear blue seas, it boasts the greatest mountain in South East Asia, and is home to some breathtaking animal and plant life. There are orang-utans. There are giant flowers. There are pygmy elephants.

Sadly, I didn’t get to appreciate much of this splendour during my most recent trip to Sabah last week. The reason is that I went to Sabah not to enjoy myself, but to receive yet another painful lesson in just how fragile we human beings are, and how pathetic are our attempts to plan the future. I went to Sabah to attend a funeral.

Barely more than a week after returning from our Spanish odyssey, Annie and I received very bad news from the Malaysian Peninsular. My wife’s eldest brother and his wife called saying that their daughter Dina was seriously ill in the Intensive Care Unit, with suspected dengue fever. Over the next couple of days, the news got more urgent, and more grim, until on Monday morning we received the sad news that Dina had succumbed in the night. She was 29, and only married hardly more than a year.

This sparked a rapidly arranged trip to Tawau, and emergency leave to be applied for on the fly. The dead girl’s body was being flown home to be buried alongside other members of Annie’s extended family, including Dina’s younger sister Cynthia, who had passed away in similar circumstances less than two years ago.

As per Islamic tradition, we had to be present at the funeral, which takes seven days, each day marked by family gatherings and kenduri (prayers followed by a communal feast) in the evenings. We were there for only five days, as we had to get back for work. It was a very emotionally charged time, especially for my wife, who loves her family so much, despite those frequent disagreements between siblings that an only child like me can merely stand back and marvel at.

The images of two people remain in my mind a week after the events. Firstly, there is the father of the dead girl, Annie’s eldest brother Mohammad Hassan (Kak Mad), a retired plantation personnel manager. Kak Mad was obviously fighting hard to retain self control despite his loss, sitting next to me talking politics and oil palm profits with a perpetual cigarette in one hand, mobile phone in another. In situations like this, I don’t really know what to do, or say, so I find it is best to listen, and not to be patronising by saying stupid things like “don’t worry, she is happy where she is now” etc.

However, after one of the kenduris, Kak Mad commented that God must have loved his dead daughters more than he did. What do you say when someone says this sort of thing? All I could do was to console him with Oscar Wilde’s famous aphorism that “those whom the gods love, grow young”. I hope that helped...

Secondly, I felt most for the young husband, who has just been bereaved of his wife. His name was Din, and he was a good-looking young Malay in his twenties or early thirties, wearing t-shirt and sarong, trying and mostly failing to stop himself from weeping. His countenance was constantly vacillating from a pleasant smile to the waxiness of anguished loss. All I can say is that if it were my fate to stand in his place, I don’t think I would have been able to stand and smile and play with the little kids as much as he did. He was a hero, a worthy champion for a lost maiden.

All this death and its consequences made me ruminate on the fragility and ultimate pointlessness of human existence, yet the absolute value of the life we have. It made me grateful that my dear wife is still with me and is getting better after her year of cancer, and it made me think hard about my own health issues, and about the simple, blank and unarguable fact that some day, all of us will cease to be. It might be something as small as a dengue mosquito, as fast as a speeding truck, or as big as a tsunami, but whatever form death takes, it will come.

I will end by quoting from the Holy Qur’an, Ya Sin, the verse which is normally read aloud at Muslim funerals:

“Verily, when He intends a thing, His command is ‘be’ and it is! So glory to Him in Whose hands is the dominion of all things: and to Him will ye be all brought back”.