Warning : An Emo Entry

From a very young age, you are encouraged to think. To decipher events and causes and ponder why things happen. Its easy when you’re little – neglect your teeth and your pearly whites will rot; too much play and tv and your grades will come tumbling down after; behave improperly and you get a telling off or a whack on your rump. Matters are black and white and no exceptions apply.

When you grow up a little, things start to turn grey. You realize that things are not always fair. The naughtiest girl in school who never seemed to study keeps on getting first in class; you’ve behaved like an angel the whole week and yet you still couldn’t go to a friend’s sleep-over. The concept of ‘Good Things Happen to Good people’ doesn’t seem to be quite relevant anymore. In fact, there are times when your faith is challenged when you keep observing again and again that Bad People have it all and seems to have the world swept right under their feet.

So it comes to no surprise that I couldn’t come up with an answer when many unexplained things took place around me. Why the dearest of ladies, the one person who couldn’t hurt a fly, who had worked tirelessly since the age of fifteen to make ends meet to fend for her eight children, would suffer a chronic heart attack and lay day in day out in the CCU unit of Institut Jantung Negara. Why the 32-yr old mother of two, who went into a simple day surgery to have her tonsils removed, went to sleep in her room post-surgery and never woke up again. Why a dear colleague who’s always smiling and ready to help, who was elated and over the moon (to put it mildly) when she found out she was pregnant, went to her Gynae for a routine 6 month pre-natal check-up, only to be told that there was no longer a heartbeat. Why a well renowned heart transplant doctor, a dear husband, father and acquaintance, who saved thousands of lives, drove back from his kebun with his gardener on a route he had taken countless times before, made a fatal error of judgment and collided head-on with a passing lorry, and the gardener, unscathed, lived to tell the tale.

I’m no cynic, and I hate being in such a melodramatic mood. But it drains the energy out of me trying to figure out how to explain the facts of life to an 8 and 4 year old. To try to put it into their perspective of simple black and white. The concept of qada and qadar is too advanced, incomprehensible to their minds. They see, feel and hear things, but they don’t necessarily understand. They realize that you’re upset, they know that something bad has happened, and they keep wanting to know why it happened. They want to understand.

And I can’t do that. I can’t explain to them why things happen the way they do. The best that I can say is that God takes away the people He loves the most… the Good People. Which brought a question from D1 of why then should she be good, and be taken away, which would cause pain and sadness to her family, not to mention herself? Stand to reason why one would opt to be good in the first place.

Its easy when its self-caused. If a young, generous, successful car dealer meets his untimely demise due to lung cancer, its not too difficult to explain that that’s quite possible when you’re smoking 3 packets of cigarettes a day. Or when a boy hardly past his teens crashes into a tree during a mat rempit full stunt joyride. Clearly, those are black and white issues.

It’s the grey matters that I need help on. Help me to help them.

Or I could just give you my phone number and you do the explaining to the Decons. Whatever works.