Fallen trees

What is it like starting a vacation after your boss cautioned you to mind the outstanding tasks in the last morning running up to the holiday? I had my answer years ago. Many would exclaim that the answer is illogical and irrational. Well, you are quite right, but work, fulfilling or not, can be a substance of addiction. Dependence on it is beyond common reasoning. 

Recently, I am confronted with another question – how do you spend a vacation in town but away from the packed shopping malls? This is a difficult one and I think it is a forerunner of the challenges ahead when vacation becomes synonymous with retirement, which is for some people a contemporary equivalence of waiting-to-see-God. So far, I am still searching for an answer. 

Last summer, the frequent typhoon visits, unusual heat and humidity deterred me from going to the countrysides. News reports that hikers suffered from serious injuries and died of exhaustion gave me more excuses to stay indoors in the weekends. Nonetheless, one fine Wednesday morning after several days of heavy rains, boredom got the better of me and I went for a short hiking. 

The trail was a quiet concrete road – suit me well. It was shadowed by trees that took away most of the sunlight and created a little secret world. I always like trees and forests, not the tropical forests in which trees and creepers compete with each other for the limited sunlight and space and intertwine into a dense pack, but temperate forests where you always find space to stroll around each tree and appreciate the different colours of leaves in the twelve months of a year. I may be wrong, but I always believe trees can grow and live forever, never have a retirement day. It is a loss whenever they are felled down or dry up. 

After fifteen minutes’ walk, at a small clearing, heaps of trees parts were gathered around. All were uprooted, felled, shattered or torn apart at mid trunks; they must be the victims of the typhoons. The death toll was high, I heard myself mumbling.

Standing in front of that, the silhouettes of tree trunks scattering along the dark rim of the clearing caught my eyes. Those wood blocks were worn down and should have been lying there for a few years. I could not help getting closer and increasingly more details revealed themselves. “Wow! That’s something!” I thought. Mosses and lichens had taken roots on the barks, and they became a little ecosystem of themselves. One can easily marvel at the vigour and tenacity of these lowly plants that create their own worlds out of rotten and impoverished blocks. I guess such admiration stems from our supremacy view of humanity and prejudged valuation of life forms. Living creatures, humans, animals or plants, whatever has the power, stature and will can easily force others into subordination or even extinction. They will be more likely remembered or even sanctified for their deeds. Yet, when giant pine trees fall, it is often the simple mosses and fungi that return them to where they came from; none are by themselves.

At this dark corner of that sunny morning, I wondered how these mosses, lichens and seedlings found enough light to support their survival, but they did. And, one day some of them may cast thicker shadows on those trees around them.

You may think being able to turn something perishable to something that benefits the next generation is a great blessing to this miserable world. For the beneficiaries, I guess it is always undebatable. But, in the eyes of the benefactors, the act can be an unambiguous means to reaffirm all the good deeds they believe they have achieved. It may be even a ticket or token to eternity or reincarnation. I am not sure how much truth is in these views because I have not been in such benefactor or beneficiary positions before. Chances are I will buy in these truths if I am in such circumstances. Well, it doesn’t matter, does it? The truth is always confirmed by its believer. Making oneself feel good is always better than otherwise. But, what would it be like if the dying life has nothing to give back to those being left behind except burdens and sadness? How then if the process lingers on for a long time, so long that everyone including the dying is finding the process unbearable? And, how should the dying lives the remaining days if he is alone on that long journey out?

As I walked out of the shadows and up the hill, I found heaps of recently sawed and shattered blocks of wood along the road. They must be the new victims of the last storm. The jaggedness of these wood blocks got my attention and I took a closer look – branches were actually twitched to break apart and trunks were ripped open into halves. I was amazed by the sheer force that these trees were trying to withstand before they were severed and put an end to their life. Many of them must have gone through a long fight before they were finally defeated. I could see that bundles of shredded wood were still protesting the unfairness of the match and strips of peeled bark were refusing to give up bolstering the trunks. The energy of the anger and frustration of their failure still lingered on though their lives had already stopped to exist. The storms will be forgotten soon but the marks of resistance of these fallen trees will stay on with these blocks. 

For the past 6 months, I had witnessed the passing away of many patients who struggled to survive on a hospital ward. Each of them sang a different swan song and displayed a unique fireworks show. No exception.  

Unsurprisingly, many patients and their beloved seemed to see life as if there were only life and death; it was all or nothing. They refused to accept the likelihood of an imminent death and believed that there was a cure for every illness. They would put up a fierce fight and wished that the patient were the first to escape the unavoidable end. In the final days, the families often put doctors and nurses in difficult situations and the patients suffered more than they deserved. I feel numb and sorry whenever I look into the lonely vacant eyes of these patients.

Some families, however, took the dying of patients as the final battlefields of on-going warfare. A possible large estate of the dying patient was not a necessary precondition for such civil war but it always fuelled and escalated the ferocity of the confrontation. Civilized rivals would avoid visiting at the same time and only bitched about the others to verify their solidarity and sacrifice for the patients when they spent the time with the dying. Overt enemies might engage themselves in street fights of sarcasm or discreditation. When the final moment arrived, they might not even come to an agreement what dress the deceased was to wear to meet God.

But frankly speaking, apart from the hospital pyjamas and a tag on the foot, all deceased possessed nothing when they were carried away to the mortuary in a metal cart. I am so reassured that there is always a clean set of hospital pyjamas for every deceased, at least here. A simple wash? Forget about it; never in a public hospital.

Inevitable and unwanted the final destination for everyone is, the journeys to the terminus are always full of actions, speeches and reliving of old memories and love. For more than three months, behind a curtain I heard a son in his late fifties asking his bedridden mother if he could check her diaper every evening. The old woman barely managed to whisper yes most of the time. In some rare occasions when she was in a better shape, she would say no, I’m troubling you too much,” but he did it anyway.

Scarlet, the name I gave her because of the large purple bruises from the needles on her hands, was emaciated and on continuous transfusion. She was on the ward for less than 10 days. Despite nurses hustling her to use a mobile toilet chair, she insisted on limping to the toilet with one hand grabbing her oversized pyjamas bottom and the other one dragging the transfusion stand along. Two days before she passed away, they agreed to take off the transfusion line temporarily so that she could have a bath on a trolley.

Judith always said no to the nurses when they offered her meals. She was in her early eighties and her husband was few years older. The old man came twice a day to bring her meals cooked by himself. Every evening while others were having their baby-food like dinners, she would sit herself up on the bed, carefully tidied up her pyjamas and combed her hair. Seeing the smile with tender affection on her face when the husband arrived with the dinner, nobody would know that she was in constant pain. The husband continued to bring her lunches and dinners until the last day of her life.

May had a brain tumour that stopped her from talking relevantly but her elder sister and brother always wanted her to talk normally with them. In later days, they just wanted her to say their names, at least for once.

One evening he asked the same question again. “Who am I?’

“Take a meal,” she uttered robotically after a long pause.

“May, who am I?”

“Take a meal,” she repeated after another long pause.

“Do you know who I am? Don’t you know my name? Tell me who I am!”

“Need a meal,” she muttered after drawing in a deep breath.

“Why don’t you answer me who I am?”

She remained silent for a long time with her eyes staring at the far distance.

A voice in my head answered his question, “You’re the one I feel deeply indebted to for travelling from the other end of the city every evening to attend to my basic needs with an empty stomach after a long day’s work. You need a dinner, bro.”

One late evening before I left, I went over to her bed, looking into her wide open eyes and hearing her noisy breaths, I asked if I could say a prayer of peace for her. She looked into my eyes for a while and blinked once slowly. I took it as a please. She passed away two days later. That blink was our last conversation.

Trees and fallen trees, 

Living men and dying patients, 

Vacations and retirement, 

There is no difference between them.

Every life is precious and the living of it is unique even when it is coming to an end, 

Every life tells a story if we bother to write or read it, 

Every living of a life is touching if we live with it, 

Every story lives on if we cherish it. 

O fallen trees, you have all my compassion and respect.