for all the ghosts that are never gonna...
this is not the most compelling of issues for my first blog ever, sans the intro-type thingy i did about 2 seconds ago, but it's kind of fresh on my mind and well i'm too tired to dig up other angst-filled , issue-ladden topics from my vast plethora of. so it will have to be: "can you miss something if you never knew what it was or felt like in the first place?”
so i was chatting to my 80-something year old grandmother, we'll call her "ana", she's cute, sharp as a tack, funny as shit and her english spans about 4 sentences and a handful or arb nouns like "security deposit", "transit", "go study you useless grandchild of mine" and "construction". she also has some choice expletives for my pater, seeing as he had whisked off my mother (the golden child of her era) in a whirlwind romance, took her back to the other end of the world and then abandoned her. so i allow her her misgivings and join in on the father-bashing fun. today's before-dinner chat was interrupted by the arrival and quick departure of a visiting tibetan monk, whom we lovingly refer to as lamala. seriously. "lama" means monk and "la" is a sign of respect in our language. see, you learnt something. now lamala is a refugee tibetan monk. 24 years of age, smart, equipped with all the latest electronic gadgets(ipod, 02 PDA et al) and his nepali sounds worse than mine, so it's always a pleasure to talk in nepali around him. so after a quick convo about the latest hip-hop songs i may or may not be able to supply him with(psssh! poor dude), he's off with a twirl of his saffron robes. "sigh", goes ana, i ignore her, i'm still in awe of lamala's new phone with 5 megapixel camera and karl zeiss optics, and no it's not that n-series yuppie grabber. "sigh" goes madam, and it's a, i really have something to say, sort of sigh. i bite, with a what's up gran. she promptly informs me that lamala lost his dad recently, i'm remorseful albeit in a detached manner, because i remember a convo previously with him wherein he told me that he never knew his parents. my gran fills in the blanks for me, the blanks being that he was separated from his parents at age 2 or 3 and that he hadn’t seen them in 19 years or so and had given up seeing them as he is a practicing buddhist monk, seeking refuge in india and due to the china-tibet crisis, well yeah, nearer to impossible were his chances.
my ana went on to say it must be really hard for him and how sad he must be and how he must be going through all the usual admin one goes through after losing a parent. now i'm not sure if i was just in an unusually usual weird mood or saying something just to fill in the spaces but i told her i didn't think it might be all that bad. she politely asked me to explain myself, i suspect also, in an attempt to find out my feelings about my dad and what's been going on in our family for the about the past 10 years or so. the thing is i'm not to verbal when it comes to the whole verbal side of being verbal. hey, i enjoy a good dad-bashing rant or even a discussion on defunct families and how mine could top the lot. but when it comes to the feelings, emotions and my views and takes on it, i prefer to keep mum(lol) and remain detached. people have different ways of dealing with crap, i have mine and they seem to have worked up until now, but a recent chain events have led me to believe that i may have to review my methods on dealing and maybe revise them. but, i digress. so i go on to tell ana that if a person doesn't know another person, and then loses that unknown person, he may feel sadness but not an infinite amount as compared to had the person known the dead person more deeply. she retorted with a very compelling loss is loss and sadness is sadness theory, which i agree to on a certain level. but look at it this way kiddies, if you never ate delicious chicken or tofu(for the vegans) in your entire life and you woke up tomorrow and paris hilton had bought every piece of chicken(or tofu) for herself and there was none left for anyone else, besides finding it amusing what stupid things rich people get up to, would you feel like majorly bummed out that you are not going to get to eat anymore of it? i couldn't explain who paris hilton was to my gran let alone tofu, so i used an example closer to home. she'd recently met my nephew(i love him) and her one and only great-grand-son aged 3 and a bit. let's call him "the omen". i asked her, had she never met him and had heard something(touch wood it never does) had happened to him, how would she feel. well obviously she'd feel sad and broken, but i wasn't done yet, my arguing spirit had kicked in full spirit. i agree that she'd feel horrible and a bad sense of loss, but compare losing someone you'd never met, no matter how closely related, to someone you'd met even just once. that one meeting makes all the difference between a sad sense of loss and infinite loss. i'm not trying to be stubborn for nothing or emotionless, i just think that loss is loss, is not a just argument. there are definitely different degrees to pain, suffering, loss, misery and thus by association emotion. or is that by ascent. anyway, my point was that, even though lamala had lost his dad(not to mention all the trauma of being uprooted from his homeland and seeking refuge in this political hotbed) and it must be painful, he's better off in that he never even knew his dad in the first place. so his loss is just by association of thought that this was his father and he now no longer exists. how, pray tell, will that affect him in his daily routine or normal life, except for a few pangs that he never knew the man who sired him.
our discussion was cut short as dinner was served, but it kept me thinking for a good few hours. if all theses emotions have so many levels and not everything is black and white, how do you react to the loss of someone you've known your whole life, when you think you feel absolutely nothing for said person? neither love nor hate. just indifference. are we compelled to feel something because the person may have been a prominent fixture in the early years but became "just there" of late. or is that displaying monsterlike qualities. am i too morbid?
so i was chatting to my 80-something year old grandmother, we'll call her "ana", she's cute, sharp as a tack, funny as shit and her english spans about 4 sentences and a handful or arb nouns like "security deposit", "transit", "go study you useless grandchild of mine" and "construction". she also has some choice expletives for my pater, seeing as he had whisked off my mother (the golden child of her era) in a whirlwind romance, took her back to the other end of the world and then abandoned her. so i allow her her misgivings and join in on the father-bashing fun. today's before-dinner chat was interrupted by the arrival and quick departure of a visiting tibetan monk, whom we lovingly refer to as lamala. seriously. "lama" means monk and "la" is a sign of respect in our language. see, you learnt something. now lamala is a refugee tibetan monk. 24 years of age, smart, equipped with all the latest electronic gadgets(ipod, 02 PDA et al) and his nepali sounds worse than mine, so it's always a pleasure to talk in nepali around him. so after a quick convo about the latest hip-hop songs i may or may not be able to supply him with(psssh! poor dude), he's off with a twirl of his saffron robes. "sigh", goes ana, i ignore her, i'm still in awe of lamala's new phone with 5 megapixel camera and karl zeiss optics, and no it's not that n-series yuppie grabber. "sigh" goes madam, and it's a, i really have something to say, sort of sigh. i bite, with a what's up gran. she promptly informs me that lamala lost his dad recently, i'm remorseful albeit in a detached manner, because i remember a convo previously with him wherein he told me that he never knew his parents. my gran fills in the blanks for me, the blanks being that he was separated from his parents at age 2 or 3 and that he hadn’t seen them in 19 years or so and had given up seeing them as he is a practicing buddhist monk, seeking refuge in india and due to the china-tibet crisis, well yeah, nearer to impossible were his chances.
my ana went on to say it must be really hard for him and how sad he must be and how he must be going through all the usual admin one goes through after losing a parent. now i'm not sure if i was just in an unusually usual weird mood or saying something just to fill in the spaces but i told her i didn't think it might be all that bad. she politely asked me to explain myself, i suspect also, in an attempt to find out my feelings about my dad and what's been going on in our family for the about the past 10 years or so. the thing is i'm not to verbal when it comes to the whole verbal side of being verbal. hey, i enjoy a good dad-bashing rant or even a discussion on defunct families and how mine could top the lot. but when it comes to the feelings, emotions and my views and takes on it, i prefer to keep mum(lol) and remain detached. people have different ways of dealing with crap, i have mine and they seem to have worked up until now, but a recent chain events have led me to believe that i may have to review my methods on dealing and maybe revise them. but, i digress. so i go on to tell ana that if a person doesn't know another person, and then loses that unknown person, he may feel sadness but not an infinite amount as compared to had the person known the dead person more deeply. she retorted with a very compelling loss is loss and sadness is sadness theory, which i agree to on a certain level. but look at it this way kiddies, if you never ate delicious chicken or tofu(for the vegans) in your entire life and you woke up tomorrow and paris hilton had bought every piece of chicken(or tofu) for herself and there was none left for anyone else, besides finding it amusing what stupid things rich people get up to, would you feel like majorly bummed out that you are not going to get to eat anymore of it? i couldn't explain who paris hilton was to my gran let alone tofu, so i used an example closer to home. she'd recently met my nephew(i love him) and her one and only great-grand-son aged 3 and a bit. let's call him "the omen". i asked her, had she never met him and had heard something(touch wood it never does) had happened to him, how would she feel. well obviously she'd feel sad and broken, but i wasn't done yet, my arguing spirit had kicked in full spirit. i agree that she'd feel horrible and a bad sense of loss, but compare losing someone you'd never met, no matter how closely related, to someone you'd met even just once. that one meeting makes all the difference between a sad sense of loss and infinite loss. i'm not trying to be stubborn for nothing or emotionless, i just think that loss is loss, is not a just argument. there are definitely different degrees to pain, suffering, loss, misery and thus by association emotion. or is that by ascent. anyway, my point was that, even though lamala had lost his dad(not to mention all the trauma of being uprooted from his homeland and seeking refuge in this political hotbed) and it must be painful, he's better off in that he never even knew his dad in the first place. so his loss is just by association of thought that this was his father and he now no longer exists. how, pray tell, will that affect him in his daily routine or normal life, except for a few pangs that he never knew the man who sired him.
our discussion was cut short as dinner was served, but it kept me thinking for a good few hours. if all theses emotions have so many levels and not everything is black and white, how do you react to the loss of someone you've known your whole life, when you think you feel absolutely nothing for said person? neither love nor hate. just indifference. are we compelled to feel something because the person may have been a prominent fixture in the early years but became "just there" of late. or is that displaying monsterlike qualities. am i too morbid?
posted by nuna @ Monday, October 06, 2008
4 Comments
