Intruder Alert

I gate-crashed a funeral yesterday. Well, at least that's what it felt like.

What led to this strange turn of events, you ask? Contrary to popular belief, I did not hire myself out as a professional mourner (Chinese funerals sometimes engage the services of professional mourners to lend a suitably dolorous air to the proceedings).

Funerals are sad occasions in their own right. Yet this one was particularly heart-wrenching, even for a stranger like myself. The deceased was a widow who lived on her own. Concerned friends discovered that she had died… alone at home in her own bed.

Her 2 grown children were noticeably absent from the funeral. The few relatives who showed up seemed distant, both in blood ties and in demeanour. In fact, those most affected seemed to be her friends who lived nearby, the motley crew who formed her real 'family' during her last days on earth.

As I sat through the funeral Mass, I found myself wondering:
What must she have felt as she breathed her last, alone…with no one to hold her hand or pray for her?
Why were her children not at the funeral? What do they feel now, knowing that their mother has died?

Most of all I wondered… I wondered what this lady's story was. What kind of a person was she? What was her youth like? What were her hopes and dreams, her fears and struggles? What was her story?

For the truth is that each and every one of us has a story. At some point, she would have laughed, wept, loved and been loved - much like I now laugh, weep and love. Yesterday, this stranger's life story intersected mine. This elderly widow, whose existence I wasn't even aware of before yesterday, quietly barged into my life and shook it up with nagging thoughts that refuse to go away.

At first, I felt like I was intruding into the private pain of a stranger's family. Later, I realised that the intruder was not me, but her. For it was she who had actually intruded and lodged herself into the no-entry zones of my life, robbing me of my peace - reminding me of my mortality, reminding me of my parents' advancing age, chastising me for not calling them more often.

In some weird way, I feel like I've been given a peek into a sacred moment of a stranger's life. And it has left me humbled.