As I recalled the occasions when my stubbornness had the better of me, I could not help flashing back on one. I was reminded of the morning when my sister and I had to be at the mortuary of General Hospital where my mother’s lifeless body laid awaiting some preliminary funeral rites.
My mother’s good friends were gathered to help my sister out with the putting on of special clothes for my mother. As I knelt by my mother’s already stiff and cold body, my sister and her friends put on four sets of clothes for her, layer by layer. (The number four as pronounced in Mandarin ‘si’ which also sounds like ‘death’ is significant here when all things followed the same number, including the number of times a knot is to be tied!)
While doing so, they would chant something and her limbs would become flexible to allow them to do their work. I was forewarned not to open my eyes during the procedures but just to kneel down quietly. Now and then, I was instructed to call out to my mother as if to inform her I was by her side when all these were happening.
My mother’s good friends were gathered to help my sister out with the putting on of special clothes for my mother. As I knelt by my mother’s already stiff and cold body, my sister and her friends put on four sets of clothes for her, layer by layer. (The number four as pronounced in Mandarin ‘si’ which also sounds like ‘death’ is significant here when all things followed the same number, including the number of times a knot is to be tied!)
While doing so, they would chant something and her limbs would become flexible to allow them to do their work. I was forewarned not to open my eyes during the procedures but just to kneel down quietly. Now and then, I was instructed to call out to my mother as if to inform her I was by her side when all these were happening.
However, my curiosity was too much to control, so I lifted my eyelids a little to steal a look. In the end I witnessed everything, from the dressing up of my mother’s dead body to the closing up of the coffin’s lid. I saw how a few men heaved the heavy coffin out the room and on to a lorry outside the mortuary. My disobedience was not let off because soon enough I was punished.
That night and several nights after that, I had the strangest nightmares, the sort that I dared not reveal to others lest they thought I was mentally disturbed or the like. I dreamt that my dead mother came back to life and insisted that she was still alive when they hammered down the coffin’s lid. Horror of horrors, I thought to myself, that could not be and I reasoned out the impossibility.
Why are dreams always so stupid, I remember saying.
When I was a young adult, I realised that there was a good reason for not allowing a young child to witness the preliminary funeral rites as the ones mentioned. My mother’s friends were afraid that I would not be able to accept the fact that my mother was suddenly dead.
That night and several nights after that, I had the strangest nightmares, the sort that I dared not reveal to others lest they thought I was mentally disturbed or the like. I dreamt that my dead mother came back to life and insisted that she was still alive when they hammered down the coffin’s lid. Horror of horrors, I thought to myself, that could not be and I reasoned out the impossibility.
Why are dreams always so stupid, I remember saying.
When I was a young adult, I realised that there was a good reason for not allowing a young child to witness the preliminary funeral rites as the ones mentioned. My mother’s friends were afraid that I would not be able to accept the fact that my mother was suddenly dead.
Nonetheless, I refused to link the disobedience then, to the unfavourable ‘feng shui’ I have experienced in any other times of my life.
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