Greatest Love of All

I know I mentioned that the next few posts were going to be on the autobiography, but yeah, something else felt more important. I got to know that a close friend's mum was recently diagnosed with cancer and she's currently undergoing chemotherapy. It must be tough for the family and words cannot convey my concern. Felt relieved when I knew she was in stage 1 (and not any later) of the illness. Truly hope that everything would be fine for them. I pray to God that she would recover soon and emerge stronger from the ordeal.

Hearing about this reminded me of another similar predicament. Not too long ago, I witnessed how another friend's mum (Florence) succumb to the illness after a 1 year fight with cancer. She wasn't so lucky; she was in the 3rd stage when diagnosed. I saw how she became weaker by the day and gradually lost her will to live. To most of us onlookers, yes we feel sad and sympathize, but the truth remains that we're not the actual victims. We can never fully understand the extent of their pain and suffering, the battle they are waging both physically and mentally.

Florence had lung cancer despite never having smoked. After the initial trauma of realisation and acceptance, she gathered her courage to undergo treatment. For those of us whose knowledge of chemotherapy is restricted to what we see on tv, trust me it's at least 10 times worse in reality, and probably 20 times worse if you're the person going through it. The perpetual state of nausea and enfeeblement is enough to bring the strongest-willed person to his/her knees.

But yet Florence persisted. Her love for her husband and 3 children kept her going. When she was first diagnosed with cancer, her eldest son was only in his second year of uni studies. She was the sole breadwinner of the family as the father was quite useless in my opinion. She really wasn't ready to leave them behind helpless and defenseless. I could see it in her eyes every time I talked to her that she has so much she wanted to do for them. She wanted to see her eldest son graduate. She wanted to see her second son start having direction in life. She wanted to see her youngest daughter grow up. On the night she passed away, for the first time in life, I felt the emotion of "cannot let go" or as the Chinese say "放不下" in someone so immensely. She was clearly on the brink of death, but she just couldn't allow herself to go. All of us called out to her to let go and that her kids would be fine. Eventually she did.

And that's the love of a mother for her children, a selfless form of love that is truly the greatest of all.

My mother is a saint I tell you. And I think almost all mothers are too. She works so hard even at her age just to make sure that her children need not worry about financial issues and can concentrate on their studies. And useless marvin still wants to study at 27. She cleans the whole house and cooks for us without complaints, and I rarely even lift a finger to do any housework. Sometimes I feel like an utter idiot. I can spend so much time doing stuff in school, with friends and group mates, but yet I rarely help her out in her chores. She has done so much for me but what have I ever done for her?

Sometimes it's so ironical what things we can do for our friends, and not for our parents. We go out with our friends all the time, chip in to get presents for them, talk to them about their problems and stuff, but we don't do any of that for our parents. Heck, we even lose our cool and get impatient with them if they start nagging a little, though we can stay on the phone to hear our friends/girlfriends/boyfriends lament about seemingly petty stuff. Is this really our love for our parents? Well maybe this checklist would help put some things into perspective.

When's the last time you:

1. Sat down with your mum and initiated a conversation.
2. Asked her if her day was ok.
3. Bought her a mother's day present.
4. Bought her a birthday present.
5. Took her out for dinner.
6. Went to catch a movie with her.
7. Told her stuff going on in your life.
8. Took time to accompany her watch tv.

When's the last time you talked to your mum for more than 5 minutes?

I'm not trying to say that if you have been doing all of the above, you truly love your mum. Or the converse. But if you're not really doing any of these things, I think it's quite likely that your mum can't really feel your love for her. Mothers are human too, they need concern and signs of assurance to know that they're doing a good job taking care of you. Consider this, isn't it absurd to claim that we have "no time" to accompany our parents when we can like just "hang out" in town, watch the crappiest of movies simply because our friends wanted to?

I'm not sure about you, but I'm going to stop finding excuses for myself. It's true, I don't think I show my mum my love for her enough. I don't want to wait till it's too late to realise that I ought to have started earlier. You know what I mean. Parents aren't immortal, they don't live on forever. So to all you people out there who love your parents to bits, don't just keep it to yourself,

Show them you love them.

- Marvin