personal epics

Some people we meet loom larger than life.

As a young girl, they were mostly fictional. Christopher Reeves playing Superman-
his dark brooding but kind eyes and that straying lock of hair - Back to the Future star Michael J.Fox in spite of his comparatively diminutive size was god-like to my pre-pubescent eyes.

As a teenager besotted with Shakespeare, Hamlet and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre inspired in me the yearning for the pathos of melodrama - I began to configure myself after the elements of a tragic heroine. Of course on hindsight I appeared more like the comic farce, the tragic queen parodied, a clown. (all things considering what kinds of tragedy can a middle-class, English-ed, over-achieving Singaporean girl really go through?)

At the age of 21, returning from years away in the UK, I find that my parents look...
smaller... no longer the looming figures of authority they once were.

Yet, my father's life story and his personality suddenly took on proportions I had never before experienced ...... as the ex-parent, he was more equal now in some ways, but so worthy of reverence because other people can't stop heaping praises on him.

2 nights ago a dearly beloved Reverand David Chan passed away at 9pm after suffering heart attack while he presided over the wake service of another elder in my church,
- and the mortality of fathers hit home.

I was heartbroken to see the tears we fought back, the whole lot of us - choir members who have taken him for granted as a permanent fixture in the church - and I thought about my own father who turns 64 next year who will one day also leave me.

My conclusions...

My father is larger than life, his story is an epic that I will carry with me for the rest of my life, he is every bit as real, every bit as awe-inspiring as the fictional characters cardinally responsible for moulding my mind my whole life.

On the side...

Heard yesterday at one history lesson that towards the end of the 19th century, Erik H.Eriksson derived a whole Freudian psycho-historical perspective on Martin Luther based on Luther's trauma and obsession with his own father. It seems that in one sweeping psychoanalysis the entire Protestant movement founded on "justification by faith" may possibly be denigraded as one man's resolution in never feeling worthy enough for his own uncompromising father.

It's a skewed way of looking at a person's motivations and I felt offended that even if some of it were true we can discount an entire movement that is theologically founded on essentially God's Word.

But the idea kinda sticks:

Why do we make epics of heroes and villains - Oliver Stone of the "Platoon" and "Nixon" fame is about to release one about Alexander the Great - when they are all around us?

Historical characters, with their tragic flaws and mighty conquests make great epics.

But personal epics require effort of gargantuan proportions to get noticed.

Both equally worthy to be remembered.


For Rev. Chan:

"You have run the good race, you have fought the good fight. You have kept the faith. Well done, my child, well done." - choral piece entitled "Well done, my child".