Pak San

'Pak San doesn't walk. He runs.', my aunt observed.

And all of us nodded in unison.

Pak San was 59 years of age, but he didn't look any older than 45. Inhabitating a small figure and possessing a super human agility, Pak San did everything fast and efficient and still managed to give running commentaries to whatever conversation we had. Sometimes he even did it in Chinese. This, of course, annoyed my late grandma terribly. Here were her grandchildren, all clueless in their own grandmother tongue, and yet this driver could speak it oh so effortlessly.

Pak San had worked for my aunt for 18 years. He was my aunt's Bik Yah. Someone who had worked too long and known us too well, that he had grown to care about us, and us about him. Care enough that we would accommodate his all-knowing attitude and his quirky acts. In short, he was part of our extended family.

It was tragic and suddened. Two motorcycle riders did thoughtless acts. Double-lane crossing on his part, a fast and careless riding on another. They performed brain operation twice on him to reduce the blood cloth, but it was too late and too little. My aunt couldn't hold the tears, her eyes were swollen for days.

We all visited him at the hospital. He was already in a deep comma. They placed him in a ward of people who were just waiting for their time to exit the stage. 'At this point, there is nothing else that we can do. We hope you, family members and friends, can accompany the patient in his last moment', the doctor said. There were some painful moaning in the room, some crying, but mainly just blank hopeless stares. At one moment, there was quietness in the room before it was broken with the laughs of the young staff interns. Apparently someone just delivered one funny joke. I felt suffocated. I hate hospital.

After 5 days of comma, Pak San left all of us. 'At least he didn't feel any pain', we tried to cheer each other up. He was buried the next day, and life goes on for the rest of us.

I received an SMS a few days after, 'Thanks for the mangoes. They are very sweet. I'm eating them now while sobbing a bit remembering Pak San, hiks ...'.

My aunt is quite the jokester, and the visual of my aunt crying while eating mangoes made my mother and I smiled and saddened both at the same time.

Rest in peace, Pak San, and thank you for everything.