Grief

Grief is the most commanding of human emotions. How can it not? 

In a matter of hours, seven out of the eight blocks at a subsidised home-ownership residential complex, which were undergoing renovation, were destroyed in Tai Po. More than one hundred people, including a firefighter, were confirmed dead. Many were missing. 

I have been thinking a lot about a quote that is probably attributed to Julian Barnes: "Grief is vertical while mourning is horizontal." Grief makes your stomach turn, snatches the breath from you, cuts off the blood supply to the brain; mourning blows you in a new direction.

There are no fixed "right" or "wrong" ways to grieve. But it is not just telling people to "get over it" or "move on." I just finished a short novel One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid. That is a story of Emma who was left a widow after her husband's helicopter went down somewhere over the Pacific. All passengers were supposed to be killed in the fatal crash. What could be found were a propeller of the helicopter on the shore of an island, and her husband's backpack. And the body of the pilot.  

Emma wore the grief like a shell. She found herself wearing it for a long time and then one day she realised she had outgrown it. So she put it down and walked away, only coming back to visit every once in a while. Somehow, this wasn't what she expected. The shell turned out to be heavier than she expected. Too heavy to be easily put down. 

Burnt

A lot of things happened to us this week. I guess nobody lives an entire life without a crisis. And yet, in a matter of few hours, we had to face the most harrowing and disheartening nightmare we believe we have ever heard.

In the morning, I was riding bike with my wife near Tai Po, from Ma Liu Shui Waterfront to Tai Mei Tuk. That traffic-free bike path is a favourite route of my daughter. And our family, too. The Tolo Harbour Cycling Track is mostly flat terrain. The only steep climb happens to be near a fire station at Ting Kok Road. The tough ride upslope forced us to slow down and spend more time looking at the fire station. Little did I know then that I was going to hear, a few hours later, the hugely devastating story of a firefighter who was killed in an inferno ravaging Tai Po.

A fire broke out that afternoon in an apartment complex, home to around 4,600 residents in Tai Po. Smoldering smoke particles became flames that became explosive tornadoes that became canonical blaze. Everyone is in shock, and I am no different. I got a knot in my stomach, which started the size of a penny and grew with the mounting death toll announced in the news.

The number of fire victims is expected to rise, with many people still missing. 

May God pitch his tent of mercy over the scorched place in Tai Po, and get us out the "burn unit", back into the sunshine again. 

Listening

It's so easy – too easy, perhaps – to lose the art of listening. 

A pause, I suggest, for all of us. A step back, and think about the all-too-common mistake of not listening. To help me become more aware of my listening habits, I picked up a book The Lost Art of Listening, written by an experienced therapist Michael P. Nichols. 

One good lesson for me is the mistake of "Me Too." Think about your friend telling a story of hardship such as "I hardly slept at all last night." Most of us won't devote ourselves to receptive listening. Instead, we might be tempted to cut in and say, "Me too! I was up and down all night." Or else, we might interrupt and say, "That reminds me of the time ..." 

What is the translation of telling our own stories? 

"I can top that." 

That means we aren't showing genuine interest in our friend's experience. Doing so is not going to validate our friend's feeling; we're validating ourselves.

Nature

Do we search in order to have? 

Sometimes, we search in order to find. 

There is a world of difference between the two, as Jarod Anderson learned to find his path. He is a poet and writer who had been shattered by depression. At one time, his depression led him to contemplate suicide several times an hour. 

He described himself as “a burden to his partner” with neither plan nor hope in his memoir Something in the Woods Loves You. Anderson would not bother when he moved into a 275-square-foot basement apartment with a shower smaller than most refrigerators. He didn’t even talk to the landlord when there was no hot water for five months. 

His healing came a long way, and eventually after paying attention to nature. When he met wild creatures like squirrels, red-tailed hawks, bats, opossums, he saw the light at each turn. Watching great blue herons in Ohio has become a source of wonder. Climbing out of his car and smelling the citrus tang of leaf rot and muddy water, Anderson had invited nature back to his life. That’s a path he knew he won’t be measured by bank statements or resumes. 

Connection with plants and animals allows Anderson to live with less pain and more meaning. As any lover of nature can attest, encounters with nature can do wonders for our well-being.

Cemetery

"The cemetery is a place of gentle quiet. At night, I can hear the whistle of distant trains. It's a lovely place." This is what Jarod Anderson mentioned in his memoir. 

Many famous poets and writers, as what Jarod Anderson did, lived close to cemetery. Examples include Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

Maybe the cemeteries are unwelcome four-letter word or taboo in our society, but I'd suggest it's time we rethink how unique and peaceful the cemetery can be. Before we become comfortable with cemetery, we have to make peace with death. All lives end. We learn from Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie that "once you learn how to die, you learn how to live."

In case you haven't visited a cemetery for quite some time, find time to go. Take a moment to walk around. More than twenty years ago, I had to fly to Edinburgh for a professional examination. Unfortunately, I couldn't beat the jet lag to study when I arrived the day before examination. The wait for examination, alone in a foreign country, felt like forever. To outfox the anxiety and attain true inner freedom, I decided to take a walk around a cemetery close to my B&B. Thankfully, it worked.

I visited a cemetery this morning too, before another professional examination (as an examiner this time). The cemetery, with fine examples of baroque ecclesiastical art and a doll-sized mint-green church, is truly a source of peace. 

Creative

Good writers strive for originality, and they seldom use idioms taught by our high school English teachers.

Composition writing, for many students, involves rote learning. Because most teachers themselves were students of rote teaching, there has always been a preconceived notion of learning idioms by heart. Many idioms, with time, has become a formula for writing essays. 

The difference between the use of cliché and creative writing, of course, is best appreciated by reading works by good writers. One of the novels I have recently finished reading is Percival Everett's Erasure. The novel tells the story of Thelonious Ellison, a black novelist who is not black enough; he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard. He is good at mathematics but no good at playing basketball. He is drowned in a family and identity crisis. His father was dead for several years. His sister was recently murdered by anti-abortionist. His mother was slipping away on her kite of senility or dementia. He could hardly get a job at the English Department, let alone having his new book published. 

To explain his tough situation, he wouldn't use the cliché that he was the captain of a sinking ship, that implying some kind of authority, but rather he was a diesel mechanic on a steamship, an obstetrician in a monastery. 

Admit it, the last two sentences are better than any idioms we've ever learned.

Goal

I haven't always known to ask the big questions about depression, or try to understand why some people had suicide and some had so much things worth living for. When my wife and I watched the bittersweet monologue play Every Brilliant Thing last night, we found a canonical "keep going" or  magical "keep writing." 

Not long after a mother's suicide attempt, her daughter (or son, in the original and many other versions) makes a list of all the brilliant or joyful things worth living for. She starts writing at age 7 and her list keeps growing. A solid goal to hit, 1000 things. One thousand things helps.  

The best part of setting a quantifiable goal is the satisfaction of seeing what we can accomplish, what we're capable of. That is also how the novelist Jami Attenberg used the #1000wordsofsummer movement – write 1000 words a day, every day – to motivate herself and many others. 

A helpful thing to remember is that we can't finish what we don't start. The only way to the end is through.

Think about the Nike slogan and you will know the way to start the proverbial one-thousand-mile journey.

Bird

Struggling for breath and beds during the dreadful pandemic five years ago, little did Dave Jones know how NHS would be able to handle the crisis. The intensive care unit consultant in Wales posted a tweet, "The NHS reminds me of a hippopotamus. It might sometimes appear slow, maybe a bit bloated and somewhat unresponsive. But my god, this last week or so has shown that like a hippo, it can move bloody fast and have some awesome power when it needs to."

As a doctor, I'm not sure how many hippopotamuses I have ever met. All I know is that all animals, humans included, are under the curse of the inverse care law which was coined by Julian Tudor Hart, another British family doctor in Wales. According to Tudor Hart's law, the availability of good medical care tends to vary inversely with the needs of the population it serves.

The stories in Dean-David Schillinger's Telltale Hearts resonate with the famous inverse care law. Before Schillinger became the professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco, he saw a patient with back pain and fairly profound anaemia in a public hospital clinic. That immigrant from Guatemala, uninsured, turned out to have a cancer condition called multiple myeloma. Schillinger made a phone call to the oncology fellow but was told that the next available appointment was not for three months. Distraught at the long waiting time with which the patient had little, Schillinger made complaint but was simply told that the purse strings were held tight. Schillinger kept calling four other hospital systems in the city, including the university hospital and the Catholic-run hospital, but none of them offered his immigrant patient the "charity care" that they so often claim on their tax forms. 

After the stressful clinic, Schillinger received a hysterical call from the babysitter of his four-year-old twin boys. After a flurry of questions, he figured out his son's parakeet was sick. The languid bird just sat on the bottom of the cage, as motionless as a statue. In the same afternoon, Schillinger found a bird vet who ordered an x-ray to diagnose a germ cell tumour. The waiting time from presentation to laboratory workup to diagnosis to treatment options, as it turned out, was a matter of forty-five minutes.

Think about the difference between the Guatemalan immigrant with myeloma and a Central American parakeet. Every word from the inverse care law is true. 

Vulnerability

Stories of marginalised populations should be told and not silenced. The lesson from their experience is the importance of handling social vulnerabilities. 

Between the Mountain and the Sky is a true story of orphaned children in war-torn Nepal. It's sad to hear the story of Juntara, a miniature Nepali Celine Dion who, in a matter of five years, turned into a blind Ray Charles. Juntara sang the most beautiful songs in the echoey Himalayan amphitheatre, but could not see anything except flashes of light at around the age of five. There were no doctors.

What she knew is she might be cursed. Like many of the sick in Nepal, she had never seen a doctor before, and only knew that the ginger and herbs prescribed by the village shaman or Ayurvedic healers didn't make her see.

After Juntara got the rare chance to be diagnosed having a genetic condition of neurofibromatosis, it was instantly apparent her eye situation was critical. The architecture of her optic nerve, once a gossamer network for bringing light, was a mess destroyed by tumour. Juntara was suggested to have series of major surgeries. Nevertheless, the highly complicated surgery means that she could easily die during the operation. Dying on an operating table is downright catastrophic. 

Here's something you probably can't imagine: this doesn't seem to upset Juntara and her family. Death is different in Nepal where there are so few ways to prevent it. There are far more landslides and leopards than doctors. Unbeknown to her doctor and most of us, the surgery was already good enough to offer Juntara a glimmer of hope. Juntara wasn't afraid of death. And she did die of surgical complication at the end.

A heartbreaking story. That's a story to be heard. 

MacLehose

Not many of us are capable of running ultramarathon race. But everyone in Hong Kong should watch the documentary film, Four Trails, which captures our city's legendary endurance event where runner complete all four iconic trails, the MacLehose, Wilson, Hong Kong, and Lantau.

I have never run a marathon, let alone an ultramarathon. That's fine. If we spend all our time regretting that we aren't young anymore, or we haven't achieved finishing an ultramarathon race, we lose the opportunity to enjoy the moment we're in. 

If you're like me, you should celebrate the beautiful trails we are able to enjoy. This weekend, I spent a morning hiking the MacLehose Trail Section 7 and 8. The Needle Hill is one of the most challenging climbs on the whole trail. I was lucky enough to finish despite the thigh cramps. I could have looked back on the days – maybe 20 years ago – when I ran faster without cramps. But why should I? That's what Emil Zátopek, the great Czech Olympic long-distance champion, meant when he said, "Don't look back. You're not going that way." 

We should not compete with our past. That's a race we could ever win. I would rather remind myself to go home and have more core strength training.