(1260)Pain

My son met up with his favourite cousin. After a nourishing meal that comforted their souls, they went shopping. They bought sausages, bread, tarts and last of all, six big tubes of Counterpain.

Now, that is a little out of the ordinary. A few questions later, it was revealed that my aunt by marriage used one tube (family size) every two weeks to dull her pain in her lower limbs beneath the knees.

While I have always known her unhappiness, I never realised the amount and the degree of pain she had to endure. Sure, she lost her dad before school age during the Japanese occupation of peninsular Malaysia. Instead of going to school until age 17, she gave up early at 12 to look after her four brothers and to run the home. Her widow mum used to hold two jobs to make ends meet.

My uncle could have been the best looking man in his neck of town, but he was not an easy husband. My grandmother definitely would not have been termed a good mother-in-law. But both my grandma and uncle had passed on. The former departed 44 years ago while the latter died 2 years ago. If it was those two were the source of her pain emotionally, then she should be better now. What she should do is to let go, forgive and enter a new phase of a better life.

Now I thought of the maid mentioned in blog 1258. After three husbands and five sons. She still work hard at age 62. Her husband divorced her and she lost two sons to him. The second husband was murdered by his brother-in-law over a few acres of rubber land. She managed to keep the two sons with this husband. The third husband disappeared while her youngest was a toddler. Yet she said God was good to her. A friend introduced her to her present employer 23 years ago and she never look back to those tearful days with three young children.

Comparing the lives of my aunt and this friend, I conclude that it is not what happened, it is how one reacts that determines one's life. Most Indonesians I met are Moslems, they have a certain way of attributing happenings to the will of God. It may sound fatalistic, yet the ready acceptance of bad fortune and the reaction of working hard to overcome it seemed to work for this friend.