Grasping At Photos

I read this article in last Friday's Straits Times, in the Home section. If you haven't read it, here's a summary. I couldn't link to the online version in the Straits Times because the cheapos have made it a paying service.

[Toddler Orphaned By Blast Turns Two

Toddler Matthias Ng will know his parents only through photos. When he was just four months old, they died in a blast at their Toa Payoh Factory Unit.

Yesterday, on his second birthday, the court inquest into his parents deaths recorded a verdict of misadventured. ..... ..... Since that day, Matthias' paternal grandparents have been looking after him. His grandfather, 61-year-old Mr. Ng Choi Hing, said yesterday: "We celebrated his birthday on Tuesday instead, because we knew we would cry today."

The families of ........ Production worker Pang Chen Suan, 39, escaped through the unit's toilet window....

For the Ng family, the verdict has hardly made things easier to bear. Life has fallen apart for them....

The family lives frugally, taking meals of dried fish, eggs and porridge. The elder Mr. Ng works as a cleaner while his wife, 58 looks after Matthias at home. He is also taking part-time massage classes to get another job.

"We get by day by day. My three other children are working overseas and they send us what money they can. We are worried about how Matthias has to face the world alone when we have to go one day," the grandfather said.

The contrast with life before the accident could not be more stark... ...

Mr. Ng's parents still keep the couple's clothes and personal effects, to keep the memory of them alive for Matthias. "I want to be able to tell him how wonderful his parents were and how much they loved him," said the elder Mr. Ng. ....

Photos of the couple have been put up all over the flat. One, a poster-size wedding photo, in the master bedroom is cleaned every two days.

"Sometimes Matthias will lift a small stool and try to reach the photo with a handkerchief, or put his face next to the photo and call out for his father."-Matthias' grandfather.]

I thought this was just so sad. That kid will one day wonder why other children have parents coming to fetch them from school, but he doesn't. Grandparents aren't quite the same, even though he's quite lucky to have such caring ones. It will be so painful for him the day that he is old enough to realize and understand that his parents died when he was really, really young and he never had the chance to know them personally. And there's nothing he can do to change that indelible fact.

Isn't it sad that it takes the misfortunes of others to treasure what we've got? Something becomes more valuable when there is a chance that it can be taken away. And life is like the ultimate jackpot prize that's so precious because death exists.

Don't leave reading this on a gloomy note though. I've extracted some comments from L.H.'s blog.

"I stopped smoking completely since Sec 2. But alcohol does stupid things to you. Thank god I don't know how to smoke properly."

O.O like OMG this screams of AH LIAN. lol. Sorry if you read this, L.H.

"By looking at the tamil language on the MRT map, we now know that any word that has the 'f... or ph..' sound is written by 3 dots. Or small circles, in a shape of a triangle."

Hee, this gives us even more variations of the dot-dot-dot word.

BYEBYE!