About 4:55pm on Jun 2, 2010 was the last time I spoke to Mummy at her place. I bade her goodbye in my usual manner as she was sitting on the couch watching her usual 包公 series on the telly.
What was unusual was that she was almost sleeping the entire day and the entire night before, which was a rare luxury for her since mid-April this year where she began her slumberless days and nights. Despite her drowsiness, she refused to sleep further by late afternoon and made a tremendous effort to get out of bed. She proceeded to the living room where she drank some water and finished a bottle of herbalife shake as well as some soursop my 伯伯 & 伯母 had brought over when they visited her that morning.
I don't think she completed her episode of 包公 before she returned to the bedroom again. She went back to her slumber and slipped into unconsciousness amidst her difficult breathing.
According to the paramedics who brought her to the hospital in the ambulance that night, mummy has gone into respiratory arrest. She had a serious lung infection which her immune system was unable to fight.
According to Sherman, mummy's immune system had began shutting down a couple of days back due to lack of nutrients and fuel.. she hardly had any food intake and even threw up whatever little she ate.. This side effect of throwing up food from the nose cancer treatment during which she almost lost her life, did her in.. and she lost her life to pneumonia. Hence, despite a pronounced terminal-stage breast cancer patient, the cancer cells in her body were manageable but the viruses, bacteria and parasites were not.. at least not yet.
Most importantly, her poor ailing body was exhausted.. consistently she had eaten and puke most of the food she put through her mouth in the last twenty years; and despite her condition, for the last more than a year and a half, she had bravely and carefully swallowed countless supplement pills and capsules everyday to provide her body with ammunition to fight her cancer; final straw must be the indescribable pain and numbness she experienced all over her body on top of the daily sleepless days and nights in the past two months. Mummy is a fighter through and through.. although mummy has never gave up the battle, it must have been too much for her body to bear. I am sure she is as reluctant to leave us as we are overwhelmed with grief to see her go.. No doubt, she has left behind a legacy for us to follow up. She has completed her mission here and has gone on to begin a new mission.. for sure in a much healthier body; we should be happy for her. She has prolonged her life for exactly 20 years as she has wished, and has completed her duties as a filial daughter, responsible mum and wife, encouraged and nurtured numerous friends, gakkai members and leaders in their faith and lives, and even became a grandma of three lovely girls! Everyone is walking nearer towards death everyday from the minute he or she is born, without a single exception. What matters more than the length of one's life is what value the person has created in that life. Mummy has definitely lived her life more than well, and will remain an inspiration and role model to her children and many others. I am extremely proud to have this beautiful and courageous mummy, and will strive hard to be a daughter of whom she will be proud of too..
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