Grieving

*This is an “emo” story.

It’s nice to receive Christmas greetings from friends. This only goes on to show that people still remember you. But it’s not nice at all to receive a Christmas greeting from one of your friends on Christmas Day, only to have her inform you the very next day that her father had suddenly passed away.

The numerous weddings that I had attended and heard about this year had so far been interrupted with three shocking news of former schoolmates’ parents passing on. It’s that part in the circle of life which you would rather pretend never existed.

These people who had passed on were still too young to so suddenly end the journey of their lives. They had witnessed their children grow up and graduate from universities, but yet to witness any of them get married… yet to experience the joy of being first-time grandparents.

There are not many other people out there just like Diana who constantly remembers to cheer people up despite the various difficulties she has to experience on a regular basis.

Diana likes to play pranks on her friends. When I saw her message, “My father just passed away”, I almost wished it was just another one of her silly pranks. But it wasn’t.

I’m not exactly sure what a “crying idiot” really, really looks like, but I practically cried like an idiot upon hearing that news, putting my PREMIER© tissue paper to good use.

Diana’s my childhood friend. She had so happily wished me a “Merry Christmas” only the day before her father died. She sounded happy and cheerful. But what she didn’t tell me was that she had wished me “Merry Christmas” while freaking out at the hospital, worrying about her father’s deteriorating condition.

While sitting next to Diana this morning, she told me a story of the many Christians from different churches who regularly visited her father at the hospital to pray for him. Her father accepted the message that those eager church-goers had shared with him. She joked about her mum’s comment on how her father had suddenly become “hot property” being crazily fought over by various different church groups to share the Gospel with him.

She may be grieving, but Diana was still her usual cheerful self. She kept on telling jokes all the way while I helped her fold “hell bank notes”. She was surprised to see me trying to improve my paper-folding skills, but I don’t think there’s any sentence in the Bible that says, “Thou shalt not help a grieving friend do origami”.

Although, in Western eyes, Hell Bank Notes may look like toys or superstitious items, there are considerations concerning the use of Hell Bank Notes that some Chinese people take seriously.

Talking about “hell bank notes”, I once told a funny guy to “Go to hell!”. Was I being too mean? This married-church-leader-with-children actually did put himself through hell soon after, but through his own undoing by stalking a very young girl who’s not his daughter nor wife.

I sometimes think it is more worthwhile to help a true friend in need, regardless of religion, rather than a seemingly religious one with peculiar hidden fetish and fantasies.