11 March 2018

In memorium

After all the tears have been shed and dried it’s time to look back at my father’s short but eventful life.

The last time I saw my father alive was at my stepmother’s kampung home in Pasir Pekan near Kota Bharu. By then he has lost a lot of weight and we could barely recognized him from his usual chubby and large size. Normally we would celebrate somebody losing weight so drastically but in this case the cancer has spread to many parts of his stomach making it painful for him to even have a regular meal. All he could swallow is a little bit of soft liquid food just to barely survive.

When I got word of my father dying conditions from my stepmother related to my sister, my first thought was that is this my stepmother being dramatic again. Sadly she was not because moments after that my father passed away in the wards of Kota Bharu hospital. I was working overtime that Sunday morning and when I got home, I embraced my wife while passing to her the sad news. At first we thought about driving straight away to Pasir Mas that night. Linda and I will have our compassionate leaves so that shouldn’t be a problem. However, Mia and Hana have to take their mid year exam all that week and it would not be fair for them to have zero marks for their first two subjects at least. After much debate it was decided that I took the last bus to Pasir Mas that night all by myself.

After getting the news of my father’s demise, I didn’t cry right away. My mind was prepared in advance for this news ever since the doctor confirmed his disease. To be honest, I was still somewhat mad at my stepmother for bringing him into this predicament. If she hadn’t cause him to lose his good job at the plantation that time, he would have had medical benefits or at least or better health care prospect. The doctors could have detected his cancer during one of his regular company-sanctioned medical checkup and he could have been treated earlier and lived longer. Looking back now, I realized I can’t really blame just one person for something as complex and interrelated as my father’s entire life. There’s probably a million things and circumstances that has happened in the past that led to his demise and there’s nothing much I or anyone in the world can do about it.

For the first time in years, my siblings were all together reunited at my stepmother’s house in Pasir Pekan for the funeral. I didn’t hold back with the waterworks the moment I saw my father’s cold dead body in the living room. I don’t usually cry for anything but when I do, I really cried. My learned brain taught me dying is a completely natural phenomena in the cycle of life but the solemn atmosphere and the thought of seeing someone I hold so dear for the last time ever was just too much for me.

Washing my father’s body, preparing his corpse for burial, carrying and laying him to rest in the cemetery is a lesson in humility for me. No matter how advanced, enlightened and liberal you think you are, when it comes to death of your loved one, you will still need the community to give you a helping hand. You just couldn’t do it all by yourself. And for that I am eternally grateful for the community that I and my family are living with.

Pancreatic cancer has the worst survival rate of any cancers. The median survival rate for untreated advance pancreatic cancer is about 3.5 months which exactly how long it took from the day my father was diagnosed with the disease and the time he passed away yesterday. My father has been a regular smoker for the most part of his life. Like many Malaysian, he is not known to lead a healthy eating habit, lots of sugar and cholesterol in his daily diet. So it is no surprise that towards the later stage of his life, he started to exhibit a myriad of diseases.

My father has been absent for much of my life. My parent was separated when I was seven, divorced two years later and from then on I only seen a glimpse of him every now and then. Growing up without a father-figure around in the house could be difficult sometimes. I hate to explain to people that my parent is divorced and why my father is never around. When filling out forms, I have no idea what my father does as a living. His last known occupation was as an assistant manager in an estate in Sepang so that’s what I usually write. But then he is not really around and don’t contribute much to our well being. My mother does most of the heavy-lifting. Sometimes I tell people my father is gone for good just to shut them up.

That said, although brief, I can say those few days that we spent together are some of the happier days of my childhood because he would usually shower us with treats or take us sightseeing in his hometown in Penang. Even after he married and started a new family, he still managed to see us from time to time.He is the definition of a part time father. Life goes on as usual for us in our separate ways and it seems to go that way until the day my mother came up with the plan to reunite with my father.

With the support of all my family members, my parent remarried some time in 2003.I myself was a big proponent of this reunion. After growing up without my father all these while, who wouldn’t? My father was doing really well in his career, got a good position in a plantation down south. His other wife however had no inkling of his new life here. He routinely come to Serdang where we lived together in a rented house. But once his wife finds out, things started to go downhill from there.

My stepmother literally made our life a living hell. She harassed us non-stop with vulgar phone calls and letters. She even somehow got my father fired from his cushy job in the plantation despite the fact it will probably jeopardize her livelihood as well. In retrospect while what she did was totally insane, I could understand her predicament. Here is an estranged wife with a small child in tow having to share his husband with another woman. She would have none of it. My father was firmly behind my mother and us in this turbulence stage of our family struggle. He even went on to unofficially divorce his other wife after a particularly serious fight. The right thing in one’s eye could be the totally wrong thing to do and an injustice in somebody else’s view.

If you’ve thought that would be the end of the drama, you’d be sorely mistaken. Separated from his second wife, my father now unemployed and without any career prospect started to do odd jobs to contribute to the family. I remember the mornings when he would put up a stall in front of Central Market selling nasi lemak. And the time I helped him manning the pasar ramadan stall selling local delicacies.It must have been one of the lowest point of his life and he’s had many low points. My mother did her best to be the single breadwinner of the family but there’s only so much she could do. She’s just transferred from her comfy management job at the district education office to become a regular teacher in Serdang in order to be closer with us. That would also mean three months delayed salary in this country’s notoriously bureaucratic civil service. Add those two together, it didn’t take long for financial issues to put a strain in our new family relationship. As our struggle goes on, my mother despite all her patience and self-restraint, started to get on the nerve of my father. One day, my father packed a few of his belonging in his car and left all of us to rejoin his other wife. That fateful day effectively ended our family reunion.

My father unofficially remarried my stepmother, something she’s really proud to say in graphic detail in one of her toxic letter to us. However, he made no effort to release or divorce my mother and left her stranded on her own. It took years of sharia court proceedings for my mother to file for divorce because of that. My father could have let her go easily and swiftly at the courts but he didn’t and I despise him for that. Mother being the resilient and strong-willed woman that she is, goes on to rebuild her career and care for all of us siblings until we all graduated (me being the last to graduate) and goes on teaching until her retirement day.

My father however has not been so lucky with his career. The only job he’s really ever good at is managing plantations and he did got one or two jobs in the industry but they all didn’t end well for him. More than often, his employers managed to cheat and con their way out of paying him. One time they didn’t pay my father for months until he had to leave and find another job somewhere. Let’s not even get into his business ventures. His first foray into entrepreneurship got him into bankruptcy which led to his divorce with my mother. His other little projects and ventures almost always don’t seem to end well. To be frank, my father just don’t have the knack for business. His last known job was selling koran wakafs at markets and sidewalks.

Perhaps my father has been unlucky in life. He made a few career and life choices that didn’t really end well for him or his family. However to say that he has not contributed at all to this family would be a lie. When he’s got the means to shower his family with happiness, he would. When he doesn’t, he’ll just shy away and disappear from our sight. Now that I’ve got a family of my own I understand perfectly what he has gone through.

My father spend a little fortune getting me my first computer in 1997. I wouldn’t be in the IT position I am now in my career if it wasn’t for him. When I wanted to get married to my wife but didn’t have much money for it, he made a major contribution which I could never repay until now. Also the time when we wanted to buy our first home but was a few hundred ringgit short to pay the deposit, he didn’t hesitate to help. But most of all, I’m grateful of all the life lessons that he has directly or indirectly shown for me and for giving me the chance to live in this world in the first place.

My father may have not been the perfect father but I know he tried his best. My only wish is that I could do more for him in his dying days but then again my hands are tied. His cancer was already so advanced even the doctors refused to operate on him. Rest in peace father, I will surely miss you.