She was gone for good at the end of last month, a little while during the night after I came back from traipsing around Perak.

The news of it came out as sudden as it can be easily said in a line, and all I can feel then was just a hollow feeling bordering on apathy.  Why'd people have to cry so much only after someone's dead?

I don't know for sure, but there sure is a lot of resentment going on about this matter.  But really now, I am inclined to remain obstinate.

I paid a little visit to the cemetery two days after I went back.  By then she's been buried for four days.  Funeral and burial was done three days after her death, and the obituary appeared after 8 days.  Time, and time again, and supposedly of natural causes.  Time.

The Anglican cemetery's just right beside the Catholic one.  The whole area's hilly and there's a great abundance of clean air and sunshine.  Stone and wooden crosses covered the whole hillside.  Everything's quiet except for the tip-tip tap of some unseen gravediggers making a new pit.

 I stood in front of the grave wielding an iron pipe, father had his hands on a wooden stake.

He was wary of highwaymen, and well, he had his points.  The area's pretty lonesome, and the only way out was a small road that can only fit one car at a time.  The churches can only do so much on private efforts without the help of government road-makers.

Solemn.  And it was odd that the rootless flowers planted on the ground remained somewhat alive after this many days.  Someone must have tended them.

Labels: sorrow