‘How can that be?’ he demanded too loudly. ‘What good is a husband who cannot give you a child?’

‘I can think of plenty of good uses for such a husband,’ she said. ‘A husband is someone who works beside you when you till the garden, and who keeps you warm in bed at night. He’s someone who worries about you when no one else even knows that anything is wrong. And he’s the one I’d want holding my hand when I stand at death’s door.’

‘People delude themselves,’ Borenson said as if she hadn’t seen his point. ‘They want love so badly that they search for it until they pretend they’ve found it. … There is nothing to such love. People breed with abandon. The world is full of fools who have no other aspiration than to procreate. I can’t fathom it!’ Borenson stopped. He’d been talking so fast that he was puffing.

‘You don’t understand desire?’ Myrrima asked. …

‘Carnal urges have nothing to do with love – at least not any kind of love that I want. It doesn’t last.’

‘So you want more than carnal urges?’ Myrrima demanded.

He hesitated, as if he could tell by her tone that he was falling into a trap.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The best love must be founded on respect. Let desire grow from that, and when the desire wears thin, at least the respect will remain.’

‘You have my respect,’ Myrrima said. ‘And you have my desire. But I think that there’s more to love than that.’

‘Ah!’ he said, as if eager to hear her thoughts, but she could tell that he only wanted to argue.

‘I think,’ Myrrima said, ‘that everyone is born into the world worthy of love. Every babe, no matter how physically marred or how colicky, is worthy of its mother’s love. We all know that. We all feel it deep inside when we see a child.’

Borenson fell silent, and for the first time, she felt that he was truly listening. ‘You were born worthy of love,’ she said forcefully, ‘and if your mother never gave it to you, it was from no lack of your own.

‘More than that,’ Myrrima added. ‘We stay worthy. You condemn people for “falling in love.” You say that there really aren’t any “human treasures” to be found. But people are better than you think. Even the worst people have more potential than the common eye can see.

‘When a man and woman fall in love, I don’t wonder that it happened. Instead I rejoice for them. I, too, sometimes wonder what qualities they saw in each other that I might have missed. But I respect people who have the common sense to love well.’

Borenson said coldly, ‘Then you will never respect me.’

‘I already do,’ Myrrima said.

‘I doubt that.’

‘Because you don’t respect yourself.’

Borenson was getting really angry. He tried to change the subject. … ‘So,’ he said, ‘tell me something that I don’t know.’ Once again, he was holding in his feelings. She didn’t want the topic to get away from her.

‘All right,’ Myrrima said. ‘When I was a little girl, my father and mother both loved me enough to care for me when they were tired, and to hold me when I fell, and to work long hours to feed me. Maybe I was lucky, because I got something you never had. I learned firsthand about love from people who knew how to give it.

‘And I learned this: the best romantic love has a good amount of lust in it, and an equal amount of respect. But the main ingredient is devotion.’ She wondered that he hadn’t mentioned that when defining love, and suddenly she realized that he didn’t even see it. ‘And devotion is what you lack!’

Borenson took a deep breath, and she thought he would utter some denial. Instead, his hand drew more tightly against her belly, and he fell silent, as if he were astonished.

***

But it seemed to Borenson that women were like food laid out in a feast. One woman might be a satisfying loaf of bread, another an intoxicating wine, a third as sustaining as a boar’s ham, a fourth as sweet as a tart.

Who would want to eat only one single course at a feast? No one. And if a man would not devote himself to eating one thing for a single feast, how could a person ask him to devote a lifetime to eating that one food alone?

That was a rub. Every woman wants to think of herself as a whole feast. Would a loaf of bread say to its master, don’t eat that mince pie? Or would the wine demand, don’t eat the buttered parsnips?

The notion was absurd.

…But his respect for her was taking on immense proportions. He sensed that while Saffira might have been wine, Myrrima was the meat of the meal. She was the one that could sustain him.

Thus as she rode back from killing the reaver mage, and the big barbarian at his side offered his highest words of praise, Borenson felt more than proud of Myrrima, he felt a respect that he’d never felt for a woman, mingled with a sense of foreboding.

‘Silk!’ Someone yelped in excitement. ‘And his nose always twitches…’

‘Yes yes! … and there’s the old man with long beard… a wizard.’

‘Belgarath the Sorceror!’ I roared and we crumpled with laughter.

Someone who once wondered aloud why some people talk about their favourite story book characters as if they were real in flesh and blood. It’s because they are real – when I see a movie, I normally merely describe what I see. When I discuss a book with someone, I describe key scenes or characters based on what I ‘felt’ during my ‘journey’ with the story. It’s not just about a murder to be solved, or a plot to be followed. It’s more than the alternate reality – it’s about them stories which which are about us, inevitably. In alternate realities where landscapes appear strangely distant, the one thing that remains constant for our identification is the human psychology. Now that is the stuff which brings the characters, literally, to life. And when characters come to life, they become ‘real’.

And what is real? Are stories with raw and gruesome scenes more ‘real’ and privileged with a higher truth status? Away with those fluffy My Little Ponies and Last Unicornstories, give me something more edgy like Band of Brothers or Machinist?

I was recently visited by a pleasant feeling from reading Farland’s Runelords. It came by at a time when I was bent on refusing to move on from a preoccupation with life’s difficult questions. For a while, the mind dropped itself from its preoccupied perch and suspended all its beliefs to enter into the realm of reavers, Earth wardens,flameweavers and water wizards. It is a world of make belief, but a beautiful one archetypal of a world which I would have loved to be part of. And the story, in the grandest orsimplest of schemes, is one where the ideal eventually prevails over after much struggle and suffering. It’s a constructed scene, but perhaps I needed to hear it again, that song, or words which whisper of what it means to live for something and to live well, to love and be loved, and to play your part when your turn is called.

Surely, this comforting breath of fresh air is called Hope.

You must think that it’s incredibly strange to have such emotions in a world of constructed reality. And to place such importance to these emotions!

All stories continue to leave a trace in our psyche, some more than others. This is but a reflection of one’s personal or a people’s collective psyche, and also a re-articulation of a dream we subscribe to. Consciously or otherwise, what remains when words are spoken or thoughts as they flash by are the ways which we see the world fed by stories we believe in. The human mind can bend and blur the lines of myth and reality. Verily, the stories which we tell ourselves and our children have a way of directing us forward.

I suppose a little bit of love and hope, while not being able to shield us from the less forgiving climate of ‘reality’, can speed us on our way and salve the cuts we sustain on our journey.

Was, is, was, is … a good man.

The hardest part of losing someone you love is the coming to terms that the person is no longer present. You have lost a part of yourself when they leave because they have inevitably become part of the fabric which defines you; and while you have memories to hold on to, you will never be able to re-experience yourself with that person in that special way again.

And with that comes regret and sadness. Regret that time passed so quickly, and sadness for the suffering that accompanies closely behind.

My father passed on the way he wanted to – consciously, bravely, without the aid of medication. Still, he was brave but broken, surrendered yet fearful. He sweated and wept tears of bile. At times he was so brave. At other times, he became childlike, needy and lost. It broke my heart over and over again.

You only die once, and in that process you enter a space of unknowing in which you will never come back. For most people, entering that space is not a matter of choice. My father did his best – he surrendered, he asked for forgiveness, he pleaded aloud with God for mercy when the pain was deafening. If there was a way to die, I did not know it then, but he did – conceptually, at least. None of us knew what to expect.

I am angry. No, I *was* angry. This anger is slowly fading.

Am angry, was angry, am angry …

Angry because I believed that there was an internal justice to it all. Good people should die well – free of suffering and fear. It’s the very least God could do to show that He loved us. Did my father go peacefully in the end? Perhaps he did, but during his final conscious hours he was calling out to us, and I was asleep because i was too exhausted attending to his every call. Do I hate myself for that? It is not hate, but remorse. I am not compassionate enough. I am too selfish. I could have given more love.

I do not think that he would have been alive if me and my mum have stayed up. To be fair, we tried to be with him whenever he called and snatched a few hours of sleep in between. A part of me says that no matter what I did on that night, I would still have fallen asleep given my exhaustion, but the rest of me says, this is the cost for giving up on the watch. And also for thinking that there would still be tomorrow.

I did wish for him to stop the complaining, the moaning, and crying. I did wish for him to be more hopeful and to try to get more rest. We rejoiced when he started eating more, and becoming more cooperative. We wiped the blood from his mouth, we carried him to the toilet, we also collapsed on the floor together because my mum and I were not strong enough to hold him up when he lost his strength.

And this was where I had hoped God could take on where we failed. I counted on Him to make it easier for us. He had his way of showing us how He cared across the years. And so the sudden seizure, the loss of consciousness – the way he left so abruptly in that early morning was so unexpected it was downright unfair.

I try to tell myself that he is no longer suffering. But it is hard to believe when all my memory of his last moments were that of suffering and laboured breathing. Maybe God did make it easier for us; He took back another beloved son who had given Him the best 40 years of his life. Hopefully my father is in a better place, a happier place. It takes belief to do this, but my believe system has collapsed when my father left. Maybe it’s a good thing. There was a lot of anger, but I am in a spot where I can start choosing again. What I will believe in and on what basis will I make my decisions? I have come to realise and accept that a lot of people do not get to choose the manner of their deaths. Like it or not, many good people suffer unfair, violent and abrupt deaths. For now, there is no good answer to this, except that it happens. For now, I will just sit in this space of unknowing. I will not choose my belief systems yet. I will just sit and wait, and see what happens.

Meanwhile, here are some good memories. My father, hunched over the waste paper basket, using a blade to sharpen my colour pencils during my primary school days. Him, taking my hand and crossing the road to school in the early mornings. His old yellow Honda Accord – the Old Faithful – pulling up the road to come home at 9.15 pm every workday night. The first time we read ‘Banjir’ together to improve my patchy Malay; he prepared the lessons and we studied the language together. He stayed up with me till late while I rushed through my projects during the high school years; sometimes he helped me colour my drawings, cut out prints and stuck them onto the A4 paper.

He used to say exam results didn’t matter so much as character, and urged me to love those who attacked me, saying that most of the time they were insecure and in need of love.

I remember nights when he would read his favourite verse or passage from whatever book he was holding at the moment. I would cross my legs, hug the sofa cushion and listen – because he was my dad. At times the stories he told about sages and mystical experiences were so fantastic that it may have come from a fantasy story book (at least i know that fantasy is surely fiction). But whatever I know of Baba, Merton, the Bhagavad Gita, I knew them from him.

I am not ready to let go. I had really believed that things would turn out ‘well’, ‘good’ whatever. God is “Good”, all the time. Isn’t it? I’ve never really explored the duality of that statement – refused, in fact, to think about it. Good God, Bad God. As Tenzin Palmo said in her childhood days, if God made all things bright and beautiful, who made things dull and ugly?

Good god, bad god. There is only god. Or no god.

His serious eyes met mine. Without his glasses and with finger-parted hair falling in front of his face, I remember a time when that same look stared at me. Was it across the years at the library or cafeteria table?

A momentary flutter. I took time to answer, drinking in the moment with a deep breath.

Mine, my heart sang.

I pray that our love for you will reach you, wherever you are Papa. And that you are in a place of peace and divine bliss, as you would have wanted even in your human life. May God envelope you in his love – Baba before you, Baba behind you, Baba surrounding you, Baba everywhere – so that you will want for nothing. And that all the good merits you have collected in this life will bring you ever closer to merging with Him.

I still wish that you hadn’t left us so sudden. Please forgive me for being ‘so strict’ on you when it came to your treatment. I know that you love me, and I hope you know that we all love you too. I wish we had more time – time to share our thoughts, to bring you to watch more movies, to have more good meals together, to see you and Mummy loving each other, to see me married happily to AY, and to be with my children so that they would know what a special person you are.

As this not to be, please, for a moment, just love us from where you are. And then go in the peace of Christ. You have given much of yourself to us both in life and death. I pray that I have the courage to live life with as much commitment as you in seeking Truth. Please help us to keep to the path and for me especially – to forgive God for letting the inevitable happen.

God bless. You will truly, remain in our hearts forever.