112 - The day my father dies

One thing that has never come up in my everyday ponderings is the prospect of my dad dying. I know it sounds terrible to think about my father's death, but let me just explain how my emotional system works.

I don't like watching people or hearing about people being stricken by tragedy. I don't like knowing people can feel devastated, or torn apart. Most of the time this happens, is when people get too used to taking life for granted. They take the people around them, they take the things they've got for granted, and it's only a matter of time before some unknown force takes it away, because the reality in this universe is nothing lasts forever.

Something as tragic as my father's death is undoubtedly going to affect me. I shouldn't even be allowed to blog if I thought his death wouldn't affect me, due to how disturbingly stoic and inhumane that kind of reaction would be. However, the one thing that I can reduce is the shock factor. The one thing I can control is whether I feel something has been taken away from me, or has merely been lost. I don't want to feel that God will have taken away my dad. Especially with the information I have, I shouldn't feel that way.

My dad takes drugs. My dad drinks. My dad smokes. One would normally take these facts, and say they worry about their father's health, and that would be the end of that train of thought. It would be a dark piece of information lodged in the back of their mind, and they wouldn't think of it any further because they would be afraid to think of that dreadful day. Everyone wants their parents to grow old, to watch our growth, and to live a long and prosperous life.

But being afraid to think of death is what causes that sense of surprise. Having faith in life lasting forever is what makes us overwhelmed by grief. Which brings me back to why I imagine how his death is going to go beforehand. 

I picture myself in my bedroom, at my computer, in the five-person house I will rent with the English friends I've met at university. Or perhaps I will be walking out of a lecture, and as I do so, checking my phone for any missed calls. Any way it happens, it'll probably be my mother who tells me how, where and when my father happened to die in Hong Kong. I would be surprised by the news then, but I will not feel dismayed, shaken up, or awe-stricken.

I would tell my mother when I would fly back to Hong Kong as soon as possible. I would notify my housemates of what happened, and what will happen in the next few months, and will probably shed a bucketful of tears as I do so. I would fly back on the plane, quiet the whole time. On my arrival back in Hong Kong, many days will be spent organizing and discussing with my family what will be done with my father's body, and how we will commiserate him. Nobody will really care to ask me if I want to talk about what just happened. They will just assume I do, when really I don't. It'll be annoying, but I can't and won't blame them.

A couple weeks later, his funeral will happen, and I will be there in the front row, directly in front of a portrait picture of him, with his ashes or coffin situated behind it. The suit I will wear will be the most expensive outfit I will have ever purchased. Outside, it will not be sunny that day. It won't be cloudy either. It will just be normal weather conditions, semi-sunny, semi-overcast. I won't wear a tie. My face will be blank. Maybe I'll wear sunglasses, like how my father wore sunglasses at his dad's funeral. The church would be silent, just the way I like it, besides the words of the reverend that will perform the ceremony.

Standing behind and beside me will my three half-sisters of which my father also beared, my paternal grandmother, my aunts, my uncles, and my cousins on my father's side, as well as my father's co-workers, my father's friends, and three of my best friends and my mother who I invited for my own moral support.

I might speak about my father to the people who attend that day. After all, I am his son and I am a writer. I don't know what I will say, but I don't need to start writing that any time soon.

But that's already past the important part.

The important part will have been when I stand in front of his picture and say goodbye in my heart.

And as the days go by from now until that day, whatever may change externally will be countered by some change in this image that I have constructed, promptly and appropriately. Like if it turns out that I get an apartment by myself next school year, then I suppose I don't have to tell those housemates I originally planned to live with. That's how the grief reduction program works.

This system works every time. The system prevented anxiety attacks when it came to my final high school examinations, because I prepared myself mentally for glorious success and dismal failure. The system helped me face my summer job, knowing how to balancing inner confidence and the idea that I might get fired at any point I was working. The system saved me months of depression in the last few weeks I was in Hong Kong, on the plane ride to England, and for the past four months in university when I had perfectly good reason to feel weak and lonely.

Before I came to England, I imagined myself crying every night, missing home. And I now imagine crying every night after my father dies. In doing so, I live the experience once already in my head. There will be no heartbreak anymore because I've already had it broken. It's not to say I don't care about my father anymore. I'm not saying he's dead to me. I still care about him, my mother, and all of my family and friends. But I feel that I need to be strong, and I need to take care of myself. As people sometimes say, you can't look after others until you learn to look after yourself.

That's what I'm doing. That's what I just did, today. I went through the day my father dies. I will be fine on that day. They will say, "Wow, Michael. You're handling this incredibly well. I can't even begin to figure out how you do it."

And what you have just read is my explanation in full.

44 - LOL

22 - I fell to my death again.

I've been having a recurring dream for about three years running now. The exact details of the dream always change but the thing that never changes is: I die.

In my dreams, I get my head chopped off, I dehydrate in a desert, I drown, I burn, I fall off buildings, bridges and cliffs, I get struck by lightning, I starve on an isolated island, I get a plastic bag thrown over my head and asphyxiated, I get consumed by thousands of scarabs, I'm predated by wild African animals, I get run over by a train, I sit in a car that explodes or a plane that crashes, I'm in hospital and my heart rate monitor just beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeps.

If that's not enough, in my dreams, I've fallen into a deep hole in the floor, I've been eaten by water snakes while I was swimming in a pool, I've died in the electric chair, I'm unconscious but the pathologist opens up my chest cavity.

I get shot, I get stabbed, I get hung, I get beaten up, I fall off a roller coaster, I get a heart attack, I get hit on the back of the head, I get surgery but the doctor's scalpel slips and pierces my beating heart (probably the most graphic one)... aaaaaand I think that's all of them.

Last night, I fell to my death again. The setting was so eerie that normally it would've been scary. I was sitting in a dark room and I was seated a table. I was being interrogated by a faceless man on the opposite side. I ran out of the dark room when the interrogator was distracted, only to escape into a darker, smoky corridor. I run. And reach the top of a staircase. The person interrogating me was chasing me and instead of choosing to run down many, many stairs, I must have figured that it wasn't worth giving up whatever information I had to that guy, even if it cost me my life. So, I grabbed the handrail of the stairs and jumped over the side to fall to my death again.

In all of these death dreams, I see myself in the third-person. I always wake up before I hit the ground, right when the bullet is fired, the moment I breathe in my last breath. I never see the end of it. I get these dreams so often that it's all I remember dreaming about. They're not even nightmares to me, just dreams. I'm too used to them.

According to dream interpretations, dreaming of death symbolizes that I am ready to change, to have my old lifestyle, environment or personality 'die' so I can be 'reborn' to form a new one. I dream of death so often because I always want a change. It's change I can't get right now. I haven't been able to get it for three years.

That will change soon, though. I can already feel it. The day that happens will be a good day.

12 - In the end, that's death.

This is not my view on death! I wrote this as I was starting a novel (which I didn't continue writing due to writer's block) and it was part of a character's thoughts. I wrote it spontaneously in one of my creative moods. I thought it was worth sharing and that's all. 'Tis not my personal perspective.

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In the end, your eyes might tear from the very idea of leaving your life and this world. You might stay there absorbing the last minutes of your personal environment, whether it be inhaling the smells or listening attentively to the surrounding sound, or perhaps observing things in your proximity, like taking a mental picture of everything around you, or focusing on using your sense of touch as you take in your last breaths, for you might lose that particular sensation altogether once you enter another world.

In the end, you may be lying in your bed, or perhaps a hospital bed, but wherever you are: you will be weak. From the gray hairs on your balding head to the stiff callus on the soles of your feet, the state of every joint, every muscle and every organ in between will all be indications of your body's degradation.

In the end, your lungs will be loose, your kidneys will have shriveled and the cells of your liver will be wrinkled. The surfaces of your eyes and the inner walls of your nasal cavity will be drier than they ever have been in your lifetime. Your eyes will shut from the tiredness and you will remain immobile from now onwards, apart from maybe a slight twitch of the finger or a shrivel of the nose. As you lay there recalling the memories from your past, the ups and downs, the highs and lows, the good and the bad, a few tears may seep through your closed eyelids and trickle down your cheeks from all that reminiscing. As the fabric underneath you dampens, you may suddenly feel it, that moment where your life flashes before your eyes, where you feel every emotion in the book all at the same time while remaining apathetic too, where you feel a final jolt of energy coming from the last pump of your heart and there, you will have experienced your very last experience.

In the end, your heart will stop beating. The combined effect of your lungs and your brain running out of oxygen will render all other organs useless. Your front will go pale. Your back will go dark. Your blood will have trickled downwards to the lower regions of your anatomy. At this point, your thought and your feeling are long gone, which is why you will not feel tense as your muscles stiffen due to the absence of minerals being transported around. Your white cells will have died and your body will lose its capacity to fight off bacteria. For that reason, your body will begin to decompose. Your muscles can relax again, but not in a good way.

In the end, you will die.

In the end, you are dead.

In the end, the people you knew, the people you met and the people you love will come to know that you are dead. Your grandchildren will lose their memory of you sooner than your children, while your children will carry that saddening sense of loss with them everyday. Your friends and your siblings will have died already or they will soon. It is only a matter of time before they no longer think of you on a daily basis and very slowly, you will be forgotten, unless you have done something extraordinary in your lifetime to influence the world. To attain a personal identity like such is rare and the chances are: you do not matter.

In the end, you may be sitting in a heap at the bottom of a vase, or laying in a coffin six feet underground, or scattered in the ocean underneath a cliff. Burned, buried or blown away: wherever you are in the end, that's it.

In the end, that's death.