Message in a dream

Ever dreamt of deceased loved ones? The Chinese believe that the deceased 'communicates' with the living through dreams. However, they also believe that in these dreams, the deceased cannot speak, touch nor be in close proximity to the living. I guess these are the rules of the game.

I do dream of my paternal grandmother whom I call 'MaMa'. Although not often but as compared to other members of my family, I had the most "encounters" with her. She passed away on 27 September in the year 1999 after a brief battle with cancer. I would say brief in comparison to some cancer patients who suffer the horrible ravages of the disease for many years, causing long and painful sufferring. She never speaks to me in my dreams but somehow, telepathically (I guess) I always seem to understand what she means to convey.

The times when I do dream of her, I wake up awash in emotions. I feel a certain closeness to her and I just wish that I could have had a little more time with her. When MaMa was alive, she was a stern woman and never one to show tenderness. She was a disciplinarian but she brought me up and imparted her knowledge accummulated from the school of hard knocks. Life was never easy for MaMa. She came to Malaysia in the early 30s with hardly a penny to her name. She met and married my grandfather and bore him 4 children. When my father was 9, my grandfather died in the hands of the Japanese soldier (during the invasion of Malaya). Since then she single handedly brought up her own children and also those of her sister and close friend (at one point there were 8 mouths to feed including her own!)

She came to me in my dreams again. This time with her bags packed and a sad feeling in the air. I asked her if she was going to visit my aunt in Sydney but she signalled 'no' and waved goodbye. She said nought a word but somehow I felt that it was our last 'goodbye'. Could it be that she came to tell me that she has gone on to her next re-birth and that she will no longer "visit" me?

I woke up with mixed feelings: sadness and yet happy that she has 'moved on'. I can only pray that she will have a good re-birth but if that is not her fate, then I pray that she will have the courage to bear it and to make the necessary "amends" in this re-birth to ensure a better one in the next life. I realise that I might have lost some of you readers at this juncture but all I can say is that as a Bundhu (more on this in my later entries), I am a staunch believer in "reincarnation".

Back to my grandmother... It remains to be seen if her message to me in my last dream was that of 'goodbye'. I will surely miss her more... ~Jas ("~)