Tag Archives: death

Reflection: Việt Nam Death Rituals… a Look Back

According to Vietnamese anthropologist Phạm Công Sơn (1996):

Death is not the end but is the final stage of one life to be transformed into another.

Two years ago I went to Việt Nam for a spell, to visit family while my paternal grandfather (ông nội) was still alive and ended up connecting with my paternal grandmother (bà nội). As my family and I were getting ready to leave for the states my paternal grandfather’s health made a turn for the worse and suddenly my father asked if I would be willing to stay behind to watch over my grandfather and keep everyone up-to-date in the states.

For a few minutes I was tempted… more than tempted really. However in the end I decided against it and went home, only for my grandfather’s health to deteriorate to the point that my parents and all my dad’s siblings flew back to Việt Nam to bury their father. I stayed home… wondering if perhaps I should have stayed in Việt Nam… I never got a chance to see the burial process, I was unaware of the traditions involved…

Over Labor Day weekend my father’s side of the family suffered a devastating loss… only two years after the passing of my ông nội (essentially the patriarch in the family)… The loss of the matriarch. This time I had a front seat view of the traditions since the timing was as such that within hours of setting foot in Sài Gòn my family and I would be saying goodbye to my bà nội.

Since this is my first time going through all the Vietnamese death rituals and traditions it is still kind of hard to describe a lot of what I just went though – being a first-generation in America I only know so much – so I scoured the internet for some thing that would go into enough detail of what I experienced and I could just add in my thoughts along the way… eventually I did.

At Ethonomed.com there is a very thorough article to goes step by step of what happened within that family and the rituals they have undergone and most of it is very accurate to what I have gone through.

Originally I was going to add photos to this to give an idea of some of the sights through my eyes, but on second thought those are very private photos and photos that I personally would not feel comfortable showing to a public audience. So instead the photos here are those of a similar nature that is a reflection of what I went through, but not exact. This is to protect the privacy of my family and relations not only stateside but in Việt Nam as well.
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Fleeting: Life’s Greatest Irony – Death

Over the weekend I finally sat down and watched: Dirty Step Upstage, a mockumentary about an aspiring actress who finds herself sucked into a world of intrigue and fame that threatens to devour her if she gets in too deep.

I was just in a ‘blink and you miss it’ moment, but essentially I died in the movie.

Later in the weekend I sat down and wrote a few ten minute plays, one of the plays involves a character meeting her end in a car accident… Well technically she is in a coma, still able to breath and beat on her own, but the moment she stops breathing and her heart beat stops when the doctors go to attempt resuscitation it is then realized that she has a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) on file.

Ironically, the ten minute play was in a way a re-imaging of a particular scene I wrote at Currents, the online soap opera… except there was no DNR in that case, but some of the storyline is rather similar, the fight, the aftermath, but not the cause. When showing the first draft to a couple of friends one of the things that came out was that they were not able to sympathize with the male lead. He had a chance to make amends and yet he continuously pulls himself away to the point that when he finally figures out what he wanted in his life he loses his chance due to death.

In fact one of those beta readers went so far as to ask: why use death as a final result when you could achieve the same kind of emotional turnout with the ex-girlfriend dating someone else. To be honest, that would have been the most realistic way to work through things… however to me killing off the ex-girlfriend was far more definitive than having her move on. To me keeping someone alive and moved on to someone else only invites the possibility that she and him could get back together further down the road. Whileas when you kill off the character (as long as the story is still realistic) that ends any possibility of a reconciliation for anyone and the living have to live with any regrets they may end up having.

That kind of got me thinking… Why do we fear death? What is it about the concept of death that forces us to ignore its existence.
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Reflection: Fighting Exhaustion

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I like to keep busy, like really really busy. Like so busy to the point that the only time I am ever home is to sleep and even that’s only a few hours a day. But when exhaustion hits, what do you do?

When I was in high school I remember waking up at six in the morning and heading to school by seven, then I’m in classes til four to which I headed to my after school job at the local mall where I start work around five until closing which was nine. Then it was home and staying up til midnight working on homework. I also did my homework during classes and my lunch hour. Weekends weren’t much better, I was working for morning til early evening then it was homework.

There were summers during those years where I would work up to seventy (70) hours a week. Which, when you look at numbers doesn’t really seem like much, until you add in chores, homework, etc. I was always busy.

College wasn’t much better, beyond the full class load (or since it was me definitely more than the minimum full class load), and homework and studying (mind you I majored in electrical engineering), I was also holding down two part time jobs at twenty (20) hours per week per job, AND tutoring kids in high school and college out in the western suburbs… kids as in plural as in up to four kids per semester at up to two hours per kid. I don’t really know the meaning of rest.

Adulthood I work like crazy, but I also have hobbies like crazy… to give you an idea of what I do for fun, just take a look at my “original bucket list” post.

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Reflections: Facing the Inevitable

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Since this has been a subject that has popped up on occasion between myself and a few friends from various quarters, I figured I might as well write about it here… Or rather at least some of my thoughts on the matter. But first a story:

Growing up I knew quite a few people that decided to go down the medical path, after several years in medical school, one such acquaintance talked about their experiences. Originally when they entered medical school they did so with the desire to work with babies and children, but as time went on they started changing their tune and decided that they wanted to work with the elderly.

When pressed upon why the change of heart, they said: “Well doctors are humans too, and they make mistakes. So if I am diagnosing a baby or a child and it’s wrong it becomes a very complicated and messy situation, but if I work with the elderly and I am wrong, it wouldn’t matter as much because they are old and will die soon anyway.”

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