I appreciate the messages of condolence from party comrades, supporters, sympathizers, friends and fellow Malaysians on my family’s bereavement over the loss of my sister, Kit Hwa, 82, through this blog, facebook, sms, phone or direct communication.
I felt very keenly the loss of my sister, who passed away peacefully in her home in Batu Pahat, Johore on Saturday, 29th December 2007 at about 1.30 pm after over six years of battle with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), She was the eldest and I the youngest in the family with a 15-year age difference, which explains why we were especially close.
I was in Kota Kinabalu with Teresa Kok, DAP MP for Seputeh on that day in response to a government invitation to attend the Christmas Open House and we were waiting for a very late lunch on 29th December 2007 to be served after several programmes, including a media conference and visiting the Sabah leader of Parti Keadilan Rakyat Dr. Jeffrey Kitingan at the VIP ward of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Kota Kinabalu who had had a nasty automobile accident.
My daughter, Hui Ming, who was in Penang with the family for the end-of-the-year holidays, phoned to tell me the bad news about my sister. A very distraught and crying Evelyn, my sis’ second daughter, had phoned about her mother’s death and asked her to inform the rest of the Lim family – my other children Guan Eng, Hui Ying and Guan Choon, my brother in Singapore and my elder brother’s family in Batu Pahat.
I immediately phoned Ho Lai Chee, 83, my brother-in-law at home in Batu Pahat, who like other members of the family were crying. In the grief, there was also thankfulness that Kit Hwa passed away when all her five children, Eva, Wyman, William, Evelyn and Ee Yong, and six grandchildren have returned to the hometown for a family reunion from as far as Australia and United Kingdom.
Lai Chee had been a good and exemplary husband and head of the household. He was not only a successful businessman in Batu Pahat but had taken active part in the local community affairs, serving for many years as President of the Batu Pahat Chinese Chamber Commerce, President of the Kong Siew Association, the federation of board of managements of the five Chinese Schools in Batu Pahat, as well as other capacities.
However, even more meaningful than his role as a pillar of society with his social and community services must be his success in bringing up a very loving and close-knit family, although scattered in different parts of the world as far afield as Sydney and London, and the life-long love he devoted to his wife, especially the past seven years when my sis was afflicted with the debilitating AD.
My sis’ passing will be remembered by another strange phenomena. She had planted a durian tree in her compound but which had not fruited for 20 years. In the past few years, the durian street had begun to share in her largesse, but fruiting very sparingly – about half-a-dozen a year.
The next morning sis died, the family found a solitary durian had dropped from the tree – as if to mark the passing to another world of another homo sapien. To commemorate the event, the durian fruit with its increasing fragrance was given pride of place in the five-day wake.
Her funeral is this morning. In another hour or so, my sis will be taking her last journey. She was a pioneer in her time, the first batch of girls in Batu Pahat to have completed English secondary education – at a time when the social attitude of the day was to regard education for girls as a waste of time and money as they were going to be “married off” in any event, and so “no point” whatsoever in giving girls too many years of schooling!
At that time, girls were regarded as little better than “chattels” to be married off for their proper monetary value in dowry! My sis rebelled against such “gender bias” and won her battle to complete her secondary education.
But a greater heroine was my mother, Tiu Kau Nee, who was the redoubtable ally of my sis, fully ahead of her time in standing up to the regressive social pressures of the time discouraging expending too much time and resources on giving girls too many years of education.
She backed up sis and insisted that she had the opportunity to go through her secondary studies. My mother belonged to the line of unsung heroes and heroines who played their part in ushering in social changes and I have no doubt that if university education had been developed at the time, she would have given my sis full backing for her to be one of the earliest girls to proceed to tertiary studies.
Rest in peace, sis. You had been blessed with a good and loving husband and a good and loving family.
(P.S – Apologies to guests at the KK lunch that I was not my normal self, as I was distraught over my sis’ passing and unable to take part in the conversation. I also left early at the subsequent Christmas Open House, explaining to Deputy Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak, Datuk Seri Dr. Rais Yatim and Datuk Seri Dr. Chua Soi Lek – who also hails from Batu Pahat – the reason for my early departure. I thank them for their instant condolences.)