~ArienKronian

At the crematorium as we, the mourners waited to pay our last respects to my deceased grandfather, my oldest uncle collapsed.

At first we thought it was just a faint, but calling him failed to rouse him and that caused a few minutes (it felt like an eternity...) of screaming and shouting.

My younger cousin was extremely distraught crying hysterically about how our uncle wouldn't be able to breathe with everyone crowding around like that. She wasn't the only one. Several of my aunts were prostrate with grief, wailing and howling and pleading for Buddha's mercy. My mother and another aunt whose Christian were calling out for Jesus.

I'm afraid I got more than a little affected, snarling at my younger brother "How about you shut the fuck up and do something since you know so much?" when he said how they were doing things wrong etc.

I don't know, I don't know CPR.

Someone checked his pulse, my dad I think and started CPR while one of the guests who;d kept their calm called the ambulance. The crematorium is far from any hospital.

Panic ensued and almost everyone went hysterical at that sight and panicked questions of "How is he" ensued.

No pulse, no respiration. I swear the sight of my uncle's face, going grayish and the hysterical relatives prostrating themselves, kneeling and pleading and begging various gods, while my father and one of my aunts performed CPR (Dad doing the chest compressions and the other performing mouth-to-mouth resusication) will remain with me for a long time.

Hearing my Christian relatives prayers as they knelt and wept, calling on the name of the Lord, I...felt as though I was a bystander. Yes I would consider myself a Christian but in that moment, I wondered if there was a God...if there was a purpose to this senseless happening that was taking place.

The ambulance arrived after what seemed like a long time, the paramedics pushing those who crowded around my uncle aside, attaching their equipment and lifting him onto a stretcher and rushing off.

The funeral people had to hold some of us, to remind us that grandfather had to have his last respects and be sent into the fire. And so we manhandled those too grieved to walk on their own - my mother, and about 3 of my aunts and an uncle or two and laid a flower each on the coffin.... Then we made our zombie way to the viewing gallery as the coffin was moved on its last journey.

An hour or so later, when some of "the children" (namely my cousins and those who were Christian who couldn't go to the temple) returned back to the wake under the apartment block, we got news that my uncle was, and is still in intensive care in critical condition.

They've managed to stir a weak heartbeat and he'll have to stablise before they do a CT scan, apparently his brain was bleeding, leading to the collapse.

It's been exhausting. I can still write here, perhaps I should feel something other than this numbness.

If there's a God up there, we need a miracle.