A Room Called Remember

A little note on my previous post.

It was a poem I wrote back in July 1, 2007. It was around the time when my dad was gravely ill. My days then were made up of hospital visits, and my hours were spent sitting on plastic benches in the cold corridors outside the intensive care unit.

The mood was sombre, the atmosphere pierced with an overwhelming sense of futility. I still wince at the images of my dad struggling to utter his last words to me. What saddened me the most was I never got to know what he was trying to convey to me. His speech was garbled and he was barely coherent - not with the millions of tubes running in and out of his nose, down his throat. I tried giving him paper and pen, but he didn't have strength to write.

There were tears in his eyes - and they were streaming uncontrollably down mine. I was looking hard into his face for a glimmer of light, to see if there was hope for redemption for a family that had, for as long as I knew, been torn apart by infidelity, drunkeness and strife; for a family that knew more suffering and hurt than wholeness, warmth and unity.

His eyes were filled with regret and hope. Eyes that told me he understood now, that he now saw a new way of looking at his life and his world, that... that... things might just be different this time if he got well.

I hoped for reconciliation, for peace, for love. Those were the things I hoped for, and craved for. And I knew they were things I would now only dimly see, but would one day see face to face.

It's been a melancholic week, where I've had to do much thinking and soul searching. And as I peeked into the room called Remember, I found this poem that still feels as tender and raw as it did for me back then. But most of all, it reminds me that the pangs and aches that arise from deep within are echos of a soul that is fully alive, crying out for deliverance along with the rest of creation.