Parents Dying

I am a feline lover, I have a selected number of cats in my neighbourhood that I look after, I will buy cat food, and after my dinner I will walk around the community, say hello to the cats, and feed them. After sometime we become close buddies. The cats treat me as their hooman, and I treat them as my ajahns, because they teach me how to sit still and practise mindfulness of myself and my environment.

There are times when I'll go overseas and I miss my cats. I'd wonder, if I'm not around to feed them, would they be hungry or starve? Who would play with them in their absence? Would they get run down by cars or be abducted by aliens? The sort of worries that a caregiver has is tremendous, even though they might seem like unwanted cats in the community, but to me because I have been caring for them for almost a decade, I develop attachment to them.

The good news is that everytime I come back home from overseas, the cats will still be there waiting for me. These felines seem to have amazing memories, they will still remember me and rush towards me whenever I come back home from abroad and bring them their favourite treats. I learn something from these experiences: Sometimes in life we think that we are very important, that we are the only pillars in the household, and without us the family will crumble, but actually that's our selfish and delusive egos at work.

The truth is that even if we were to die overnight, we are never indispensable to the world. The Buddha Himself has passed away and even though we miss Him, life still goes on with or without Him. So one day let's say our fathers die and our mothers die, perhaps they having given so much to the family they wish vainly that their kids would miss them, yet, like my cats, maybe they do love their caregivers, but yet life still goes on in the absence of their caregivers.

Sometimes, people like to think of themselves as the sole breadwinner and pillar of support of an entire family, yet the world doesn't work that way. Every building in Singapore is made up of multiple columns, how often does a building collapse when you remove one pillar? Seldom. There are ample social security nets in this world to make sure that the surviving family members of a headless family still manage to survive and make ends meet.

I have seen many of my friends' fathers die. Honestly, I like it when fathers die, they help kids grow up. I hate it when mothers die because the suffering experienced by the kids are tremendous in the absence of their mothers, but fathers dying is a totally different story.

I learned how to not see myself as being that important. Kids will still grow up with or without me. In the absence of both father and mother, the community takes over the caregiving. You have to trust the society, the university of hard knocks is an amazing teacher.