Epitaph

It was just a small obituary which I had chanced upon, and would have forgotten the next instance - if not for the uncommon surname which stirred fragments of a vague memory.

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September 1996.

In the strange calmness of my numbed senses (after being slipped a tablet and told to sign something by a frazzled medical officer who conducted all these with an air of secrecy behind a hastily drawn screen around the bed), lying on my back and wondering why there was so much white all around me, his smiling face appeared above mine and a voice that seemed almost too loud cheerfully told me to take a deep breath, and another, and another, and... and then, there was nothing...

A few days later and a short trip to the dentist's chair, the attempt to start on a liquid diet ended up with me throwing up the chocolate milk, which the nurse found amusing: "Eh, Dr Ling, it's coming out from her nose! Hehehe!" (It was a strange experience - I almost felt like I had twin beer taps on my face, except I was dispensing milk.)

The slight furrow in his brows and momentary displeasure when I asked for an early discharge, going into my fifth miserable day in a ward full of really old and really sick people.

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The surgery was just a small procedure, hardly life-saving, though one could say it was life-changing, in a sense. There was little contact - I do not have an impression of him as a person, and only know him as the surgeon who took a tiny piece of bone from my face. Still, it seemed important that I should mark his passing - albeit belated.

When he was of the living, I really would not have cared to know or find out more. (Same goes for other acquaintances.) Now that he is gone, I wished I had gotten to know him a little more as a person. Because, the dead do not cease to exist. They live on, in the memories of the living. And I wish that I had a more complete picture of him in my head, than just fragments of encounters.

Afterthought:
Some friends who saw me after the surgery could not quite figure out what was different - but they knew something was no longer the same. For all the grief that piece of bone (to think all it took was just a few millimetres!) once caused me through my early years and young adulthood, I (and a few friends) wonder why I had never thought to ask to keep it. I guess I was just eager to be rid of it and the reminders.