She’s lost in the hazy swirls of cigarette smoke, but she’s not slipping away

I called up my 70 years old aunt to enquire just how she was doing. Life’s not treating her good lately. With her father just passed away and her only daughter diagnosed with kidney ailment and needs to undergo operation, she’s been extremely busy travelling to and from her residence to her daughter’s place just to take care of her as well as the grand daughters while the son-in-law out working. It’s even more difficult when she herself, a survivor of stomach cancer years ago, needs to deal with her own ailing physical self.

But she has that strong fighting spirit to make things work. To maneuver around the many seemingly insurmountable obstacles , one by one, which I very much admire.

I told her to take good care of herself amidst all the chaos be it physical toils and emotional turmoil that she needs to deal with, that she really should not take things too hard on herself. In her tiring voice she said in Hokkien that she tried to loosen up but every now and then this nagging worry about the condition of her daughter keep coming back, however hard she tried to push it to the fringes of her mind. I am confused, she said.

There’s somehow a tinge of resignation in her voice. `Si ani quan liao, kang kor ma si ai ke, senang ma si ai ke’.

Literally means you need to go through this life with whatever conditions LIFE dictates it wants to allocate you with, be it happy events or traumatic episodes that will shear your mental state to shreds, like a sword driving through you heart creating a deep gash along the way, such agonizing pain yet you need to deal with it, such heart-breaking emotional trauma yet you need to learn to get over it.

For how else to win these battles BUT through sheer gut and steely determination?

My aunt will know how to get around and learn to deal and get over it, just like how she comes out strong every time with whatever condition LIFE has resolvedly wanted to throw a challenge upon her, and she would in no time go back to her normal self likes there’s not a single care in the world, sitting in her favourite corner of the house, nonchalantly puffing a cigarette after a hard work day, away from the noises and the pestering and hollering of her attention deficit hyperactivity disorder grandson who is such a handful for her and whose antics can become way too much to bear at times, where she slowly letting herself loose to immerse in her own make-believe world and all is just fine and quiet and soothing, and she finds herself the many a time elusive unadulterated peace, where she so ever craves and deserves..

And she is not slipping away…