Yesterday I wanted to write one entry starting with "today I want to talking about death, because my grandma is dying". I got caught up in something else. Today I'm gonna have to start this entry with another sentence, similar yet in a way completely the opposite, "today I want to talk about death, because my grandma is dead". There are of course many euphemistic ways to express "dead", but that doesn't change the person's state of no longer living. I got a message from my cousin living in the States around 21:30, as I was watching some TV and having my dinner consisting of supermarket food which I bought after a long but not unproductive working day. She told me she passed away three hours ago. My parents didn't even bother to tell me. My grandma had been sick for years. She hadn't been eating or drinking for a week. We all knew it was time, but all weren't sure when exactly.
I read the message from my cousin with the calmness of reading any other message, about weather, about concerts, about travel plans, about baby pictures. For five minutes I had no reaction. Then I broke into tears and cried for a long long time, the first time in a long long time, in my hotel room with the window open but I didn't care if anyone would hear me or wonder what could possibly have happened to this woman that sounds so genuinely tragic. As I cried I imagined myself walking through that narrow gate into the residential compound where my grandma had always lived ever since I could remember. There have been many new buildings being built in that neighborhood, and the two buildings in my grandma's residential compound, grey and short and ancient, are still standing, almost grotesquely amongst the never-finishing construction sites that seem to be promising something too pretty to be true. Since I left home in 2006, I usually just went back once a year, and never stayed for a long period of time. Every time I would go and visit my grandma a few times, from the time when she was robust and stubborn and tenacious, to the point when she was dependent and weak and insensible. From the time when she could write lengthy letters and find the countries I had been to on the map hanging in her living room, to the point when she forgot my name and all she knew was that I was going to a place far far away and all she could do was quietly holding my hands till I left. Many things have changed since I was a child. I grew big and things grew small. Memories grew small. Things that once seemed so important and significant grew small. People I used to know so vividly grew small because of the growing distance. I am in this world and I don't know any more who is also in my world. My parents have moved. My middle school has painted its buildings into a weird pinkish color. My good friends are scattered around and it's always years between our two reunions. If I say there's no sadness in any of this, I must be lying. But I thought a predicted sadness would be at least perceived as a lighter sadness. As I was crying I realized I was not crying merely for the fact that my grandma is gone. That part has been predicted and accepted. I was crying about all those years when I was not there for people that needed me. And what I have achieved in exchange of all that. That childhood of mine, when no one remembers it any longer, will no longer be there. I talked with my cousin two days ago about whether to go back for the funeral. We agreed that it would be okay if we don't. It might be okay objectively but not okay subjectively. If you don't hold onto things, they will fly away without a trace. The guy I like said to me, I am really sorry to hear that. I thought, that hardly offers any consolation. Then I was at a loss of what to say to my mother, anything. I was never too talented with this kind of words. I've been listening to "I need my girl" from The National about a hundred times today, maybe because I might go to their concert in Berlin. The lyrics don't even make sense. On Death and Dying is the title of a book that I've always wanted to read. I've been rambling. I should sleep.
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I quite liked the story about the cleanest man in school. An entrepreneurial guy printed some T-shirts to sell on campus, and stopped after having recouped his investment, left with a massive stack of (the same) T-shirts laying under his bed. One day he was too lazy to do his laundry, so he just picked out one of the T-shirts to wear. That was pretty convenient, so instead of doing his laundry, he just took out one new T-shirt after another to wear every day. People that saw him all believed him to be the dirtiest man in school - he never changed his T-shirt after all!
But see, that's the problem. He is actually the cleanest man in school, because the T-shirt he wore every day was brand new. Then Ellenberg offered a more correct version of the famous Sherlock Holmes line: "It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth, unless the truth is a hypothesis that didn't occur to you to consider." In the case of the cleanest man, one should have a rather extraordinary imaginative capacity to cook up the hypothesis that would turn out to be true. However, in the daily interaction with other people, especially those about whom you have a limited knowledge, it is very likely that their truth would be a hypothesis unthinkable for you. Unthinkable and unheard of. How can you even begin to understand the other person if you have no means to form the proper hypothesis to start with? How am I to understand why you do what you do if it wouldn't even occur to me to do what you do at all? You see what I mean? "Probability measures the degree of rational belief to which a proposition is entitled in the light of given evidence." said Keynes somewhere. The thing is, nothing is absolutely objective. Observations might be objective, but evaluations are not. Just like when we hear random we tend to think about 3 or 7, not 0 or 5. I don't even know what bias means any more. If the default condition of all of us is biased, shouldn't it be referred to as unbiased instead? I'm confusing myself again. But it's true that we should be more careful when we use the word probability and not say things like "there is a 20% probability that God created us". Sometimes it's jus a yes no question, so pick a side. Pick a side and stick to it. Not that which side really matters as much as you think. |
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