In the simplest of terms, death happens when the body stops working. Or is it? When do people die? Why do we have to die? Is death necessary? Why can’t we live forever? Is death forever? When will you or I die? What happens after death?
On and on the questions go, and to be sure, they elicit myriad answers, none of which satisfies everybody. In this matter, I envy the religious people because based on their beliefs they have answers that they can accept and live by. Materialists, by contrast, believe that when they die, that’s the end. They just revert to the base materials that they came from.
If I have learned anything at all about death, it is one of the few things in life that is certain. We know that it happens to everybody and everything sooner or later. Nobody lives forever. Yet when someone dies, family members and friends are often surprised.
Today, having gone through a lot since my childhood during the pre-colonial days, I feel that I have accumulated some useful understanding of the cycle of life. It’s by no means a profound comprehension of the human condition as I am not a social scientist or a philosopher or a psychologist, but I can accept my mortality and get on with the rest of my life without being bothered by something that I have no control over.
Having said that, I should add that while it is well and good to philosophize about such a dark subject, especially now that I am quite long in the tooth, it wasn’t so when I was in my youth.
Way back in 1965, as a 12-year-old boy, matters of life and death were the least of my worries. Of immediate concern was the Sarawak Common Entrance Examination that all Primary 6 students of those days must pass to qualify for secondary school. It was a major milestone in my life and the lives of my classmates because whoever failed the examination would be doomed, and in the 1960s that usually closed most routes to further formal education.
The other milestone was the passing of one of my granduncles. I can’t remember the exact day or even month as it was so long ago. If I were to guess, it would be in the middle of the year, just after the harvest festival.
As soon as I learned of his demise in the evening, I decided to go to his house which was on the north side of the village. I wanted to be a good grand-nephew and a compassionate relative by showing up during the family’s time of loss. It may sound odd but I also needed to see with my own eyes that the old man had indeed passed away. How could he be dead when it was only a short while ago that I was with him?
Before going out, I told my mother that I would be back before nightfall. That was a promise that I intended to keep because I did not want to walk home at night. Even as a 12-year-old boy, I was not scared of the dark, but I did not want to stub my toes on some tree roots or rocks or bump into something.
To keep this story in context, keep in mind that like all rural areas in Sarawak then, there was no electricity in my village, so there were no streetlights. The only electricity to speak of was in a few primitive torches whose batteries never seemed to last more than a fortnight.
Also, keep in mind that when “road” or “village road” is mentioned, don’t jump to conclusion and equate it with the roads of today. In the 1960s, most village roads were not much better than rat trails (jalan tikus) in the jungle. Only the main thoroughfare that ran the whole length of my village can be considered a road in the modern sense although it was often as muddy as a wet paddy field during the monsoon season.
Anyway, when I reached the old man’s house, several people were coming and going while some men were congregating in the front compound and having a discussion. I found one of my cousins who lived in the house and we sat outside for a while. There were too many people inside and I did not want to squeeze my way through. As soon as there was an opening, I went inside.
There, inside an open coffin in the centre of the main living area, was the old man, decked in his best Sunday clothes as if he was about to go to church. He looked much paler than when I saw him last.
Just to satisfy my curiosity I touched his arm lightly. It was cold. Judging by the look on his face he seemed to be in a deep sleep. He looked like he could get up any moment and asked what the heck was happening in the house.
It was the sound of a woman sobbing loudly that jolted my mind to the present and forced me to accept that the old man had passed on.
Through an open window, I noticed that the daylight was fading fast, so I told my cousin that I must go and promised to return the next day. I ran all the way home and reached our door just as the last rays of sunset disappeared behind the line of trees to the west of the village.
I just realised that I am way ahead of myself at this point, so let me backtrack a little to provide extra context for the story.
Early on, in the late afternoon, I was in a mountain stream behind our house washing some pots and pans. It was one of my daily duties as the eldest boy in the family. In those days ours was one of the few houses that were close to the stream, so it was rather secluded from other houses along the main road that still runs in the middle of the village to this day.
I say “a” … stream because there are two of them. One is the main watercourse while the other is its little tributary. Both of them are right behind our house. Till the late 1960s, the main river was where a third of the villager bathed or did their washing, while the tributary was where they collected drinking water.
Wherever the stony river bends, even a little bit, there were deep pools of cold crystal-clear water that felt so good to bathe in during hot days. I was in one of these pools when my granduncle came. He sat on a flat rock slightly downstream of me and sharpened his knife using a long narrow stone.
I asked him where he was going and he said he was thinking of going fishing by himself later in the evening. Men were always fishing somewhere in those days.
We talked for a while and when he saw the pots and pans that I had washed he praised me for always helping my parents with their household chores. I wish he had not done that because there were times when I did not feel like doing anything except play football with my friends.
When his knife was sharp enough, he tested it on a dead tree branch that protruded from the grassy bank. While he was doing that I took a final dip into the deep end of my pool. I was feeling rather cold and thought it was time to go home. When I resurfaced, the old man was nowhere in sight. I guessed he had slipped into the nearby forest for some reason or had gone home.
At home, I found my mother gathering clothes from a long bamboo pole where she had dried them since morning. When I told her about my conversation with the old man she stopped what she was doing and looked at me intently. There was a puzzled look on her face.
“Are you sure?” she asked
“Of course I am sure,” I said. “He was there in the river with me a while ago. I think he had gone home.”
“That’s strange,” she said, her eyes darting between the river and my face. “Didn’t you know?”
“Know what?” I replied.
“Your granduncle just passed away!”
“What? That can’t … When?”
“I’m not sure. Ratum (a cousin) was here just now. He said it happened so suddenly.”
“Are you going there?”
“I still have some chores to do. If you want, you can go first.”
To put it mildly, I could not sleep well that night. In my mind’s eye, I kept seeing the face of the old man. When I finally fell asleep, he spoke to me in my dream but the words were soundless.
The next morning, I developed a fever and could not go to school. In the late afternoon, my class teacher (a cousin-in-law) came to find out why I was absent from class.
Mother was concerned. She believed that I had come into contact with an unfriendly ghost or spirit.
“You are right,” said a shaman who was summoned to check on my condition. “His spirit is not with him and must be called home.”
If my granduncle had turned into a ghost, then that was the only time in my whole life that I came into contact with a supernatural being.
While writing this article I consulted a Cambridge Dictionary and it says a ghost is the spirit of a dead person, sometimes represented as a pale, almost transparent image of that person that some people believe appears to people who are alive.
I beg to differ, Mr Cambridge; the ghost of my granduncle was not pale or almost transparent. The apparition, or whatever it was, looked exactly like him when he was alive.
Oh, by the way, I went back to that rock where he sat while sharpening his knife. I could not find the sharpening stone, but there were cut marks on the dead tree branch that he hacked. Can anybody explain that?
I also consulted the Collins Dictionary. It says a ghost is the spirit of a dead person that someone people believe they can see or feel.
Well, Mr Collins, I didn’t “believe” that I saw a ghost because I did not know that my granduncle had died. As sure as the sun will set today, I saw him sitting on the rock sharpening his knife. From time to time over the years when I doubted myself, I often recalled that we had a conversation and the memory of it is still vivid.
Looking back at that incident many years later, I thought it was cool that I talked with my dead granduncle … his ghost, I mean. It makes me feel rather special. After all, how many people had done that?
That was the only time that I had a conversation with an intelligent being that is non-human. I hope it would not happen again, but then if it did, so be it. Who knows? It might be more interesting than some of the TV programmes we have today.
ere are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of the New Sarawak Tribune.
