Rest in Peace

My homeroom teacher in grade 4 loved to dive, she used to tell us exciting experience of seeing sharks or almost running out of oxygen all the time. October 1st 2002, I remember that it was a public holiday. That night her name was on the news: she was said to be missing after an accident happened while she was deep down in the ocean. The next day back in school, when the news about her unfortunate death was announced, everyone in my class started sobbing, some crying out loud. That was my first time dealing with death.

Last summer, I learned that my Mandarin tutor passed away after a long fight with cancer. Although we hadn't been in touch for almost six years, my sister and I still went to her funeral to show our respect. I was surprised how emotional I got when I was there because we were quite distanced by then.

I guess this is the thing about death. We dread it, we avoid it, we wonder, and we fight. It is the one thing that is inevitable to absolutely everyone, even the proud and the mighty must one day lie beneath the earth like everybody else. A sad but true line in Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” points out that “The paths of glory lead but to the grave” (36) and we’ve been walking that path since the day we were born. Even though we are all well aware that death will approach us and our loved ones sooner or later, losing someone we know (they don't even need to be really close to us) is still heart wrenching because there is too many uncertainties about what happens after death. Even if there really is an afterworld where everything is perfect and worry-free, it doesn’t change the fact that there is one less of us in the world we know.