The Understanding.

She finally succumbs to cancer. She has been fighting it for the past 2 years. The combination of prescribed chemotherapy and a self-administered herbal-organic-macrobiotic diet has apparently not helped in any way.

He receives an SMS which says she’s passed away. He does not feel anything. After all, he does not know her in the strictest sense of the word. They are related, yes, but they do not know each other.

The only things they share are, perhaps a family name and a common gene pool.

He tries to remember her. He sits at a café and tries to conjure up memories of her face.

The image draws up featureless.

He tries to recall the ring of her voice, the sonorous tone in her pitching.

The sound registers a vacuous silence.

In his mind, she has no gait, no height, no breadth. There is no depth of her in his memory. In his comprehension of the world around him, she exists as a relation in oral form. Someone tells him before he is of age that is who she is to him and he pays lip service. There are no strings attached to the acknowledgement. It’s just a gesture of convenience to humor convention and appease the elders. Outside of that, there is no passion, no conviction. Over the years, the words still resounds at meetings, but the ring is empty and meaningless. A term of acknowledgement more out of convenience and also because he is so used to it, so ingrained, anything else is both strange and awkward.

So he went on with the masquerade.

As he recalls all these memories, there are still no emotions to evoke, no deeply buried feelings to find that he can use to summon a tear or even a twitch in his eyes or the corner of his mouth. There are not even superficial feelings to speak of.

---

They knew she was dying. The doctors confirm that she is in the final stages of the progress of the malignant cells.

They take their time to meander their way to the hospice.

Her siblings arrive too late.

However, they will put on a show, keep up appearances. Once again living up to convention to appease the elders – they will weep, they will cry, they will wail at the prompt of the caretaking priest. But their wet tears carry no emotions; their sonorous wails cry no feelings. Just expected production of social practices.

A family who has lost a member should grieve, so they shall, even to show the neighbours, the other relatives.

But they also show out of fear – while living they had ignored her, avoiding her like the pestilence she is and carries. When dead they fear her haunted pestering. They will do all things, spiritual or physical to prevent her return in spectral form – real or imaginary.

They will put up a show – for the viewing pleasure of others, for the sanity of their own mind.

They had done it for their parents – father and mother whose lives produced them, why not for a sibling? One who merely shares a family and a common gene pool.

After all, they have not chosen to know her. They had not even chosen to be related. They most certainly did not choose to be born – to the best of their understanding, their existence is merely a result of a chance meeting between two distant entities whose gene pools created them.

---

As he tries to recall all his memories of her in vain, drawing a blank, he comes to realize that he has been thinking of the whole experience in third person. He is apart from the whole incident. It is a non-event to him.

He finally understands, in sickness and in health, she has been dead to him far longer than he cares to remember.