At the wake.

What can we do when we sit down around the table? A plate of sweets and packets of drinks are offered to us. Paper plate, little packets of sweets that you won't eat anywhere else other than on these occasions. I open one, and I put it in my mouth. My packet of drink does not come with a straw.

What can we talk about? My mind was a blank. It drifts away while the hard sweet dissolves in my mouth. Nobody knows what to say. Nobody knows what to ask. On one side, there's a conversation about university admission. On the other, they talk about something else which I can't remember. A few people shift their seats because cigarette smoke was too close for comfort.

How is he feeling? I cannot even begin to fathom the hurt, grief, regret, and all the thousand other emotions that must be pounding his heart. It is too much for me, I will never understand because I have not experience such a loss. Grandfather/grandmother, yes. But one's own father, no. All I could manage was, "It must be really difficult to lose a father..."

It doesn't matter how he died. It doesn't matter if he was a Christian or did he accept Christ before he died. All that mattered to me was that he is somebody's father, and that he has passed away.

I don't know him very well. I've only spoken to him probably once or twice, met him on Heart.Sports. He probably don't even know me. He might recognise my face, but he won't know my name. Yet, I can't stop thinking about how he must be controlling his emotions, how he is still forcing himself to accept the fact that his father is not with him anymore, how he must be denying it all and wishing it was all just a very very bad dream.

I can't help but think about how close our age is with each other. I'm 22, and he's only 21. Yet, he had to go through this. It's too much. It's really too much. If this happened to me, I... I don't even know how I will handle it.

I remember when my grandmother passed away. That was a long long time ago. My mother and my aunties all seemed very normal at the wake. I was too young to know it back then, but on hindsight, they must have all been in denial. They must be hoping that it was a bad dream, and that if they played along with the dream, things might change. I know this because when they realised that it was not a dream, at the cremation, when they realised that it was the last time they would see their mother, they cried their eyes out.