The past week has been unusually intense.

At one point, I was concurrently dealing with

  • an internal hackathon at work
  • helping out with my aunt’s funeral after work
  • checking in on my wife, who was down with the worst flu I have ever seen her suffer in our 13 years’ marriage

It started at the end of Friday (the) 13th Dec 2024, around my usual bedtime at 10pm. I was in the shower, and was reflecting that a pretty intense week had ended.

For context, since October, I have been part of foodpanda as a PowerUpSG trainee software engineer: this is a 6 month traineeship, with the possibility of converting into a fulltime position. Last Friday marked the end of the formal classroom training portion, and we are starting the OJT (on-job-training) portion of the traineeship soon.

Friday was our last class at Ngee Ann Poly, and it was a VERY good session: we got to play around with Github Actions, and to use Github actions to send cheeky messages to a Discord server. Also, I caught up with an ex-EDB colleague over lunch, talking about all kinds of things, and it was a good catchup since we hadn’t spoken for a few years since he got seconded to Ngee Ann Poly.

So there I was in the shower, basking in the warm glow of a job well done, and preparing to go to bed after the shower, when my wife knocked on the door. “Your mum called, she is going to see your aunt in the hospice now, as she is gasping for air.”

Earlier that afternoon, my mum messaged that my aunt (who was dying from cancer in a hospice) was very active, and very well. The two sisters are extremely close: my mum still talks a lot about how my aunt was almost given away for adoption, shortly after she was born, and my mum (then 7 years old) had hugged her sister and hidden behind the door, crying and begging them not to take away her sister. My mum reported that my aunt had been very active when her ex-colleagues came to visit her: they bantered like they did in their old days, except that my aunt (who had a tracheostomy) was using a magic board to communicate via writing.

So now, it was clear that things had taken a turn for the worse. I told my wife we should go down too.

When we arrived at Assisi Hospice at the ward, we bumped into my father just outside the ward. To my huge surprise, my father muttered something incomprehensible in Chinese, and burst into tears: I quickly consoled him by giving him a hug, and also asked him where my mum was. He waved in the direction of the bed.

At my aunt’s bed, my younger cousin was sobbing uncontrollably, and holding my aunt’s right hand, while my mum was on my aunt’s left side. A number of other relatives were standing around, everyone full of tears. My wife and I headed straight to my aunt, who was already unconscious: I held her hand, and told her that we loved her, and to let go of everything in this world, and to not hold back: we will take care of each other. I basically spent most of my time walking around consoling people, especially my mother as she was very distraught. My mum kept saying “she was so active just this afternoon!”

Then more people came in, including my aunt’s brother in law who is a very experienced meditator. At one point, I think he told my other relatives not to ask my aunt to stay, but to ask her to peacefully go. I think he was also the one who explained to my aunt’s daughters about their mother’s dying process, which I thought was a very kind thing to do!

So my aunt never regained consciousness, but just gradually faded away. It was so sudden that another cousin’s wife (who was outside arranging for her uncle, the undertaker, to come and handle my aunt’s body and subsequent wake and funeral) was taken by surprise when they told her that 小姑 had passed on: she was shocked, and tears immediately flooded her eyes. I went to touch my aunt’s hands, and they were already cold; my mum followed me, and touched my aunt’s hands and biceps, and said her upper body was still warmish. So my aunt had indeed passed away very peacefully!

My aunt’s bedside in Assisi Hospice: notice that there is nothing she dislikes!
My aunt was a very lovely person, and my memory of her has always been that she loved food, and was always kind, warm and gentle with everyone. During Chinese New Year, she would constantly come up and offer tidbits and snacks: “Peijing, try this! This very nice!” With her husband Uncle Joey, they both loved providing and feeding everyone.

So it was really a lot of suffering when she developed throat cancer, and was forced to have a tracheostomy, which prevented her from smelling and tasting the food which gave her so much pleasure and joy. I really hope that she is now free to enjoy herself, wherever she is… as my wife put it, “Chinese New Year will never be the same again.”

The next few nights and days are, honestly, a bit of a blur. I vaguely remember helping to bring my aunt’s dentures from their home in Woodlands to the embalmer at Geylang Bahru, then helping out with the night watch (a Chinese funeral tradition, to prevent evil spirits from interfering with the body): I showed up at 2-3am a few nights, and stayed until 8am or so, before going to work. There was one night when I didn’t go for the night watch, as I was quite exhausted (and my wife had fallen sick): we both slept at 8+pm and woke up around 7am the next day!

I had already formed a hackathon team at work, with some of the folks I vibed with. We called ourselves Bon Appetea, and my colleagues were total ANIMALS… in a very short time, we had a WORKING full stack app, with two colleagues working on the React frontend, while another colleague (who is a NUS CS grad, who was also into competitive computing) put together the backend (server + MySQL database) in literally half a day.

My personal rule is, when a team is working well, don’t get in their way. So I just helped out the best way I could think of, which was to focus on crafting the presentation narrative, and also apply my human-centred design research & storytelling skills as best as I could: giving feedback on the flow and features, but mainly focusing on putting together a tight, coherent presentation. My team gave a lot of feedback, and honestly, I think we worked so very well together!

Watching my teammates Avery and Fiona work together on the front-end made me realize that, actually, that is what I am lacking: I lack fluency with code, to be able to code up features which can be tested with actual users. And that fluency with coding up features is what I wish to learn in future, as a next step for my learning. Avery mentioned that she learned from Full Stack Open, which is a University of Helsinki FOC full-stack, mastery-learning self-paced online course. I am going to check it out!

Coincidentally, the funeral was on Wednesday, which was the same day as my presentation. With my team’s agreement, I requested for our team to present first, so that I could present, and then leave for the funeral.

Throughout all this, my wife was extremely unwell.

Usually, I am the one who falls sick, and who needs to be taken care of, with a high fever, coughs, etc. etc.

This time, she messaged me on Monday afternoon to say that she had a raging fever of 38.8C (her normal temp is 36.5), and that she had been forced to take meds and sleep the whole afternoon…

Honestly, though, my wife is really a Spartan. I kept asking her if she wanted me to be at home, and she kept telling me “I will rest better when you are not at home, because you will be talking, making noise, and disturbing me. I just need to rest.” … and she shooed me to the office!

What I did try to do was to buy groceries, settle the meals, and also to take care of the cats wherever and whenever I could. But ngl, I was worried about my wife half the time, because I never saw her so sick before.

But she got well enough to join the funeral on Wednesday, when she was a bedrock for my mum.

On Tuesday, I got an unusual request to fetch some monks, to bring these Sri Lankan monks to my aunt’s wake for some prayers. After that prayer session, I brought them back to their temple at St Michel’s road, and then my mum told me to head home instead of joining the later prayer session for my aunt.

Wednesday was a very weird day.

It started out with the night watch, as I promised to go down early in the morning at 4am. I woke up at 3am (as though I was on a meditation retreat), and headed to Woodlands, buying some Red bull and oolong tea on the way. My aunt’s two son-in-laws were there doing the night watch, and I chatted with them for a bit, before heading off around 7am to work.

At work, I managed to squeeze in a meditation session of 30-40 mins, before we did our presentation rehearsal. Team hackathon rehearsal


Team Bon Appetea
The initial rehearsal was a little rough, but I got the rest of the team’s feedback, incorporated it, and when the time started, did a good enough job with it!

Then I left, and headed home to pick up my wife, and head over to the funeral. My aunt’s nieces, nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews during the funeral
At Woodlands, I still felt ok, as we did the last rites for my aunt. I was even ok when we went to pay our final respects before they closed the coffin… I teared a bit, mostly for the sadness felt by everyone else. Overall, I felt mostly gratitude and appreciation for having crossed paths with my lovely aunt. In general, it felt like I cried a lot less than when my uncle (my mum’s elder brother) passed away, 15+ years ago, and I can only attribute this to my spiritual practice in the interim period.

But once we got to Mandai Crematorium, my tears flowed a lot more, and I felt a lot more sad. I think it has to do with the vibe and juju of the place… and probably all the past conditioning and experiences I have had there. It was especially hard for my mother, given how close she was to her late sister… and it was also not helped by the funeral organizers, who often played very emotional songs and used very emotional words (“Think of all the sacrifices that Mummy made for us daughters when we were younger, and we would say things which hurt her…”) to evoke tears.

I guess that kinda helps with catharsis…? But I also think it felt a bit unnecessary, giving the whole ceremony a weird dramatic feel, like a Taiwanese soap or K-drama.

After we finished, we headed back to Woodlands, where there was some food catered. Initially, eveyrone was a bit subdued and tired, but gradually, the volume of the place crept up, and it almost felt like it was normal! Everyone was eating, there was laughter.

And I looked at the whole scene, and thought, “I think Ah Yi (my aunt) would love this scene: this is what makes her happiest, people coming together with her, eating and being loved.”

My mum with her nephews and nieces, at the post funeral meal

And at that moment, I think my aunt was there, and she definitely agreed with me.

Started on 22 Dec 24 at 1509hrs.
Finished on 22 Dec 24 at 1642hrs.