Father Remembered
We were asked if we wanted to say a eulogy to our father. At first, we said no. The pastor encouraged us to, and finally, my brother said he would say something.
What he said reinforced all the things I remembered about our father, which I’d been telling in bits and pieces to anyone who would listen to me this past weekend, but which he pieced together into an eloquent, coherent whole.
He told relatives and friends present at the service about how caring our father was. He remembered our childhood days when “my father would send me and my sisters, and also our cousins, to school.” Here, he looked around, saw my sister’s children, and added, “And later, he also sent my nephew and niece to school, too.”
He told of a friendly and generous man who would go around asking people how they were.
“I remember whenever I came home from Singapore, he would take me for lunch at the coffee shop, and all the stallholders would greet him, Ah Pak, Ah Pak*.”
My brother then went on to share about a particular weakness of our late father’s.
“One thing about my father was he didn’t talk much but kept a lot of things to himself. Often, I would call home to ask how he is, and he would always say he’s fine. This is perhaps why, this time, we didn’t know until it was too late that all was not well with him.”
When he said was true – a caring father and grandfather, a generous man even to strangers, and most of all, a loving husband.
After the service, Brother Arthur from Glad Tidings church who’d conducted the service, told me how father would buy tau fu fah (sweet soya bean curd) every afternoon and feed it to mother. He would also buy cakes for the residents’ 3:00 p.m. tea time.
I told Brother Arthur I would take over buying the tau fu fah for mother. I hope I can be as loving a daughter to my mother as my father was a loving husband to her.
*Ah Pak – uncle
