Be good, do good, and be nice to one other...

As a friend lies gravely ill, incapacitated, and in an induced coma, life's great mysteries stare belligerently at me with an intensity that belies the gravity of the moment. What is life about? What really matters to you when you are confronted with mortality? And what if you have your yesterdays to live once again? What would you not do? What would you do different? What will you want to do if somehow you are now given the time and the opportunity to make right what you think you have done wrong, in your past? The questions come thick and fast at me that, for a moment, it took my breath away.

Whoa... have I committed so many mistakes in my life? Are there so many things that I should have done differently? Did I do right when, over half a century ago, I decided that my daughter, born at Assunta PJ, would be registered as an Australian citizen, which I could do, by virtue of the fact that her mother, my dear wife, is an Australian?

And then many years later, a few months into my first job as MNI Regional Supervisor for the northern region - Penang, Kedah and Perlis, with an office at the Bank Negara Penang - with a salary of around RM$600 a month - my wife and I started selling Burgers at Padang Brown after office hours. Having made RM$1500 in the first month of selling burgers, I resign forthwith from MNI and went full tilt into my first business venture - selling burgers at a stall in Padang Brown ...was that not a foolhardy decision to make?

Fast-forward five decades later. I am still with my dear wife, living in Melbourne, and I remembered the most poignant moment of my life so far - the morning when I was told by the doctors that my dear wife, admitted the night before for pneumonia, and burdened with Dementia, might not live past the next 48 hours....and I was alone to hear the prognosis. And as I hear the doctor pronounce those terribly final prognoses about the life of my life partner, all my yesterdays and also the possibility of living a life without her came tumbling into my consciousness. All of that needs to be processed and put on hold while I try to think of the possibility of a life without her.

This is what life is about. Realities and memories flit in and out of our consciousness daily as we are confronted by the circumstance that is around us. This is what I just posted on my class WhatsApp group chat early this Tuesday morning:

So friends.....can we all move on too. Let us be of service to our loved ones, our family and friends, and, if we can, to our nation and to life itself.

Be good, do good, and be nice to one other......Amen.