A try at being serious.

Usually in this blog I'm flippant and irreverent, at least when I'm not angry. Since I've been challenged, however, to write something that's difficult and thoughtful I thought I'd first try my hand at being serious.

I'd like to introduce an old woman to you. She's nobody special. I mean obviously she was someone special to her family and friends, but on a scale beyond that she was nobody anybody knew about or would care to know about.

I saw this woman almost every time I walked between my home and the nearest supermarket or the nearby bus station. Say I saw her about three times a week. She was a shrivelled-up little thing. Short. Wrinkled. Every (visible) piece of flesh sagged under the weight of years. I would guess she was in her late seventies or possibly even older.

How can I guess her age? Whenever I saw her, she was sitting outside of the little house—shack, really—that served as her family home as well as a teeny cigarette and booze shop. The shack had four generations of people in it ranging from a child not much older than Lucas to this woman. A bit of math and I've got her in her late seventies and possibly even her early eighties.

This woman was in the deep throes of dementia. It was clear every time I saw her that she did not have much time left in this world. She would sit in a crudely-made bamboo chair under a piece of fibreglass sheeting propped up by a stick acting as a crude sunscreen and rain shelter in front of the family home, stare down at the ground and mumble to herself constantly. She didn't interact with anybody; her family would address her with respect and kindness, would take care of her, but she never really directly acknowledged them.

This was the normal state of affairs. Sometimes, however, she would, fleetingly, show glimpses of awareness of her surroundings. She might smile at what was probably her great-grandson, for example, and reach out to him. Or (and this is where I come in) she might actually look up at the world, see a stranger—a foreigner—and smile with almost childlike wonder. These moments were rare as far as I could tell. I maybe saw them once a month or less. It was their rarity and their unexpectedness that made them inexplicably valuable.

The more perceptive readers will have noted by now that I persist in using the past tense to speak of this woman. About two weeks ago, you see, something changed in that home and tiny shop. A large wreath suddenly occupied that primitive shelter in front of the shop that the woman sat in. Too, the house was alive with visitors: people smoking, people playing 麻将 (Mahjong) – people, in short, having a good time at all hours of the day and night for two days straight. I caught this at roughly 6PM and then again much later in the day. It was clear that the family was awake and active around the clock.

Why is this significant? That's how the Chinese mark a death. Think something along the lines of an Irish wake and you've got it about right. To help ease the spirit of the dead person into the afterlife you celebrate. You don't go to sleep (or, rather, more accurately, there's always somebody awake and active). In this way you drive off the evil spirits and calm the recently dead. Everybody in the family and in the circle of friends participates in this ritual to ensure that there's no time without the noise of a happy family.

Why else is this significant? That old lady I never knew anything about, but who would on infrequent occasions make eye contact with and reward me with a smile of purest wonder and joy, I've never seen since. When the wreath disappeared, so did she. I've never seen her sitting outside the little shop that was her home since.

This leaves me unaccountably sad.