晴天霹雳的消息

In the office today after lunch, I received an SMS from an old friend saying that B has passed away. I was shocked and read and re-read the message again: I thought I had gotten the name wrong, or read the message wrongly. But the message remained the same. A little while later another SMS from another old friend came, asking me to call him back urgently. And I did, la pronto...and...what I heard shook the ground under my feet, shifted my world where I sat. I kept asking what happened, and T said that he wasn't sure, and that B hung himself in the toilet. His body was found early this morning. 天啊...真是晴天霹雳的消息...真是无发相信...I was so shocked...for a moment I felt faint...of all people...

Although B and myself cannot be considered close, he was, after all, an old friend I grew up with, during a part of my life. We got to know each other when I was still in secondary school...and that was like...ages ago. That must've been like more than 10 years ago. I got to know him and the whole group when I enrolled for 武术 class. The whole group of us have trained together...went training camp together...laughed together...went out together...although we never kept in constant contact, we still see each other over the years during the reunion dinners that were held every year without fail. I think 教练 must've felt very shocked too...to think an able student of his...and of all people...I never imagined B would do such a thing. He was probably the last person on earth whom we would think would contemplate such a move. What must have gone through his mind just before he took his life? What must he have felt to take such a drastic move? Nobody knows, although some suspect....

I cannot imagine the horror his parents had to face, when they discovered him...I believe they were the ones who did...

Sigh...but for a moment there...I did feel tears at the edge of my eyelids...although I cannot honestly say I feel love for him as a friend...he was, however, still a friend of mine...and I feel really sad that whatever it was that had driven him to such a state, it must have really broken him. I thought I can imagine the terrible pain he must've been in, to move to take such a step...

Yet at the same time I felt the whole episode felt...surreal...it must've felt more so to the guys who met him just the night before he took his own life, becos it happened so suddenly, seemingly without any warnings. In my sadness, I also felt a momentary tinge of fear...fear that one day something beyond my limits to endure or comprehend may compel me to such a drastic (and foolish) move. Granted, I do not think that any of us want to take away our own lives; but I believe (as with this departed friend of mine), that at that moment in time sanity would have been teetering at the cliff's edge, before pitching over into oblivion; something so unutterably crushing that all the person wanted was to stop the pain, taking the only path and the only way he knew how to.

It made me wonder, that humans are really quite vulnerable at times, their 意志力薄弱. I wonder, with the advance in today's world, that human's mentality gets weaker.

It was really a great regret, that this friend could not sought solace in kinship or the friends that surround him...who could, at least, have pulled him back from the brink...of that I am profoundly sure.