Hmm

Okay, this is going to turn out to be a more sobering post than anything we've experienced on this blog so far.

In case you haven't read the papers, today's Sunday Times ran a two-page article in Lifestyle about former-RGS/RJC girl Joan Chan (and former RJC softball captain), who is in the terminal stages of tongue cancer. The doctor's diagnosis is that she should "prepare for the worst" and that she has only "a few weeks and three months more" to live. This article was a follow-up to the one the Straits Times ran last Christmas on cancer patients.

What struck me most about this was how strongly and bravely she is facing her illness, and her impending demise. She won't go "quietly into the night" (quoted from Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night"). What makes it worst is that she was in the same school, and the same CCA as us, and that she could have been our friend, if we had actually made it a point to know the girls (but that's a post for another day). The article was a very sobering slap of reality to me, because it made me reconsider my own mortality and the mortality of my friends, especially at the age where we all arrogantly think ourselves invincible. Penisil raised a similar concern before when he mentioned last time, how he felt terribly awkward to offer words of condolence to friends who had lost close ones. What would we say, if it were our friend we were going to lose, or have already lost?

I'm not going to go all morbid and somber for the rest of my life, but then it has made me feel more content with my lot in life, and strengthened my appreciation for the present reality. I really enjoy our friendship, and I do hope that we'll last beyond Singapore and whatever mundane lives we might lead in future (what a serious outpouring of goose-pimple-inducing brotherly love there).