by Atiya Achakulwisut published on 21/02/2012 at 02:09 in the Bangkok Post. Reminded me of the two dear friends i lost in the recent years. Jordan, will forever love you. And Nabs, you are truly missed.
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The dark side of Facebook is not only its celebration of triviality _ it causes us to have to wait for friends to post photos of our food before we can eat it, for example _ but the social networking tool sometimes also brings to us unexpected news, that a friend from a long time ago has passed away … long while ago without our knowing it.
One thing people like about Facebook is how it helps us find childhood or college friends, most of whom drifted apart after we completed our studies. With the new medium, I have kept in touch with friends from Prathom (Grade) 5, secondary school as well as university.
It is always hilarious to see how old we have all become, compared to the youthful looks we had in dated, school-day photos we often share with one another … kids in uniform with bright smiles and carefree eyes that knew not what sadness lay ahead in the future.
It was through one such group posting that I learned yesterday that one of my high-school friends had died two years ago from cancer.
She was one of those people I was close to at one point in time, but never really kept in touch afterwards. Indeed, we felt we got along so well during our Mathayom schooling that we chose to sit next to each other for a few years, even though we appeared to have contrasting personalities. I was a rule-abiding goody-two-shoes while she was an artsy rebel who didn’t care too much about core subjects but excelled in art.
Through those years I absorbed from her an appreciation for Rolling Stones’ music and Mick Jagger. Her school book was full of lips-and-tongue drawings of the band’s logo. During lunch break, she would convince me to use a public pay phone to call the Nightspot radio programme and request her favourite songs.
Her painting of the Arc de Triomphe on a wet, cloudy day received the highest score ever from our art teacher, making her something of a legend in our class.
I passed a qualifying exam which allowed me to skip Mathayom 6 and get into university earlier. My classmate and I drifted apart. From time to time, I would hear about her success as a promising interior decor student at Silpakorn University. I also heard about her decision to quit college in the final year because she disagreed with her thesis adviser. Through mutual friends, I also heard about her rising reputation as an independent designer who did stylish displays for some prominent shops locally. I was proud of her although I’d not met her since we’d left school.
I expected to keep on hearing about her growing accomplishments. So the sudden news that she’d been dead for two years was quite a blow.
Selfish as it may sound, the death of a friend makes me think a lot about mortality _ its being a non-negotiable eventuality and its influence on how one should live one’s life.
We have heard it all before, I suppose… how we should strike a balance between life and work and how we should find more time for people who love us than the people we work with.
Still, many of us struggle to find that balance. Some of us, myself included, wake up in the middle of the night because of work-related worries.
There’s a blog I stumbled upon over the weekend which I found insightful. Again, it’s nothing we haven’t heard of before, but the way the information has been gathered from people who are really dying, makes for powerful reading.
The blog, called Regrets of the Dying, is written by Bronnie Ware, who worked in palliative care. In the article, she states that when asked about regrets, patients who had between three to 12 weeks left to live, gave some common answers.
Ms Ware wrote that the five most common regrets concern: not living a life that is true to oneself instead of the expectations of others; to have worked so hard; not to have had the courage to express one’s true feelings, not to have stayed in touch with friends and not to have allowed themselves to be happier.
“This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice.”
“When you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind. Life is a choice. It is your life. Choose consciously, choose wisely, choose honestly. Choose happiness,” she wrote.
We’ve heard it all before, haven’t we?
Atiya Achakulwisut is Deputy Editor, Bangkok Post.
