(First Uploaded in Facebook Notes)

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Dateline: 14 November 2010

Time: 0740 hours

Mother, if you had been born 21 years ago we would be celebrating your personal freedom whence you would be given the symbolic key to the house. But alas, you left us 21 years ago. Instead of singing with joy and celebrating each moment, how do we remember you by?

Though it only seems like yesterday, your last smile is only a memory. All we have are memories. Memories which will make us smile, or make us cry, because no matter how good they are, we do not have your presence.

A mother’s love is instinctual, unconditional and forever.

How today’s mother adds up to this is sometimes a big question often left unanswered as a modern mother has gone through a completely different paradigm in life to sometimes forget the virtues their own mother instilled in them.

Again, how do we want to remember you by? How do you want us to remember you by?

I had only married 10 years when you left us. Those were hardly enough years to get to know my wife. We had gone away 2 years to New Orleans, USA. So that left only 8 years. We brought you a little gift from New Orleans in the form of our lovely baby daughter.

But my wife always remembered that you had to attend many weddings and we used to take you to a shop in Ampang Park. The shop was called Phoenix. It was one of a few gift shops in those days in KL. Of course, my wife acted as the negotiator to bargain for the gifts or she would look for gifts which had been discounted but still were thoroughly good value.

I remember you most for the smile on your face. It never disappeared! Are ladies of your generation so hardy as to accept everything in their life with such grace? What has happened to that? Have our new mothers less? Whenever I felt down, I never got the chance to wallow in the problem when I was with you. Your smile instantly glowed and would lighten up everything that was bothering me, off from my shoulders.

Our little daughter then kept you listening to her stories! Yes, she is a good story-teller! If it was not about what she did at kindie, it was questions time! “Why is that person’s face so sour?”, she would ask. She would also conjure up her own answers! When your plane landed that fateful day, she was so eager to see you that she followed to board the aeroplane. The moment she saw you she was already telling you what she did while you were away. Little did she know you could not hear her?

I was extremely sad as I remember in the afternoon as she was leaving for Jakarta for a holiday, I had a terrible thought that she would leave us all. So, when the children and her grandchildren were saying farewell by shaking her hands I kept away. In my thoughts I figured she will not return alive if I said farewell to her now. As I was thinking, this farewell would be forever. Maybe I was right as she came back alive but suffered a stroke on arrival at the airport.

I miss you very much. I often think about all the good you did in life. How loyal you were to your husband. Think of all the things I miss of you. Time is suppose to heal but does it really?

My siblings, nieces, nephews and everyone else, share with me your thoughts about her.

Al Fatihah.