12:48 a.m. - 2006-11-24
my mom's dream about father
Thursday, Nov 23rd 2006.
Tonight, during one of the commercial breaks on tv, mother told me about a dream she had about father while she was napping this afternoon.
I sat at the sofa listening to her as she said she was feeling a little ache in her back and probably tired too, so she laid down and slept on the living room sofa.
She dreamt that father was back, he was also in the living room, sitting on another chair.
I imagine they were both looking at the stock market indices on tv, as they usually do like last time.
My father he likes to study the stock prices on the teletext, and I think ever since he stayed home because of his leg and lower back pains, reading the newspapers and following the stock market were his only companions/hobbies/ways to pass time.
At other times, he would be in his room lying on his bed, trying to sleep despite his pains.
At the later part of his life, he ate his meals in bed, propping himself up on his left side with his elbow and spooning up porridge or the mixed vegetable rice I bought for him.
I�d always felt that it was very sad, seeing him eating alone.
To tell you the truth, I am an inexpressive, emotionally awkward person, I didn�t know how to react naturally, I felt and behaved like a kid, helpless towards my father�s pain.
I remember seeing his pain for the first time, one Saturday when I returned home from army (I was 19 then), and when I first saw him, he was lying in bed, he got up and squatted on the ground, he said he had this pain in his lower back and thighs, it had just started, the pain shooting intermittently in periods of the day, and then only mysteriously eased a bit after he squatted on the ground for about ten minutes,
I felt empathetic and also thought that he would soon get well and the pain will go away.
It didn�t, and he continued working till I was in university year 2, enduring the pain, taking the one and a half hour train transport to work every morning with the crowds. He was working in Boon Lay, the same place I go to school, and so I know how crowded the trains are and how there are no seats for him to sit.
Staying at home, seeing the doctor, he didn�t get well� and who would have known, we the family would slowly be desensitized to his suffering, seeing and hearing his howls every day and waken by it in the night.
It was a worst thing, a bad period for all of us.
My father suffered his pain that we do not really understand or can feel, and I know that a lot of times he felt (and we also did to a different degree), he felt that he was a burden, making us sleepless.
But it was in fact his sickness and not him, which is the trouble but one is not so clinical, when several doctors and treatments have been sought and found useless, one feels helpless angry and desolate.
My father in one of his wrecking bouts, started uttering and pleading, prayers to god to relieve him, to spare his suffering, to save him or kill him, he even called me to pray for him.
To have anyone go through this shit, I don�t believe in god and if there was him, I hate him.
My mother�s dream,
She and father were in the livingroom, talking to each other,
I asked her what they were talking about and she had no idea, just stuff�
Was he alright? I asked.
She said yes.
(It has become our custom to ask if he looked alright, not suffering in pain, in our dreams told to each other, because we want to hope that he is finally cured and well now, after his death, after the prayer rituals my mother got priests to conduct. It is my mother�s fear that he would continue to be in pain even after death.)
And then she asked him if he wanted to eat some Jam bread and milo, and he said yes.
While this was going on and my mom went to the kitchen to prepare the food,
She said she kept thinking,
So father is back now, that�s good.
But what if he goes out and the neighbours see him, they will get scared,
And say, �isn�t this man dead? Why is he still here?�
She kept thinking this, going over the logic,
And then� she woke up.
