Here’s a thought, what if God is dead? That our creator has ceased to be, and there is no power overseeing the universe anymore. It sure would explain how life as we know it seems to be growing exponentially chaotic and volatile. Senseless things that have been happening, things that seemed to have no reasons for occurring; these entire events would make sense if there is no Light to guide us anymore. Mankind given unrestricted free will, with no higher power to oversee the course it will take, is a definite recipe for disaster and for sure life now could be summed up as an unmitigated catastrophe.
I did not come to this conclusion out of the blue. It started with a seed of doubt from unfortunate personal experiences, sprouting into something more concrete after observing my surroundings in my immediate community, and finally it grew firm in my mind that the universe must be going on without any supervision when the world seems to get crazier by the day.
I will be called a heretic by both of my faith and others of different faiths should who believe in God in whatever form He takes, should I share my views and why I am convinced that they are valid.
I’m not saying that God never existed. I just believe that after aeons of looking after the vast galaxies and endless universes, that God just expired from exhaustion and now we are left with no one to guide our lives anymore.
Truth is there is more to my conviction than mere observations. I’ve had flashes of thoughts in my head of the time that the universe lost its overseer. There was stillness in that single moment in the entire space that is known to man and those beyond man’s knowledge when God disappeared.
This cataclysmic event did not happen in recent times. God has been gone for a long, long time and most people could not tell the difference between the time when God was there to rule us and the time God disappeared because such is God’s power over the universe, that everything is managed well enough, so everything could go on without God’s control without anyone being none the wiser.
Yes. Yes. I know. I sound schizophrenic. Visions of unimaginably fantastical things in my mind’s eye would definitely class me as certifiably crazy. But I know the truth.
The clincher is self-serving, of course, and you would simply call me jaded because what truly convinced me that those visions of God disintegrating which in turn lead me to believe that God is no more is the simple fact that God would not have let me go through nine identical heartaches if He was still around.
Say what you must, but I stay true to my belief that we now live in a Godless world, ruled only by the residue of what was Godly before.
Yes, it is self-serving of me to think that God is dead when all the men I fell in love with, and my two children were taken from me viciously by a fate that would not see me live a happily ever after.
Once or twice is perhaps bad luck, but nine deaths? No. God would not suffer onto His subjects such pain. To have loved and lost once is hard enough. But nine times?
No. I’d rather think that there is no God than to think that God is cruel and purposely out to break my soul for no apparent reason.
For a span of 21 years, from age 17 right until today at the age of 38, I have fallen in love and lost my love to the Grim Reaper nine heart- breaking times. Seven loves to seven men, and two loves to my two children who all met with untimely deaths.
Love number one, my very first love whom I thought would last a lifetime died tragically when he was 19 and I was 18. He was walking beside a construction site and a brick fell and hit him on his head. He died on the spot. His name was Liam and he was on his way to the park near the construction site to meet me.
He was an aspiring writer with big dreams who wrote me into all his stories and poems. He loved the colour blue, mashed potatoes, chocolate milk, Manchester United and Wordsworth. He was an only child to parents who had him in their late forties.
I thought I’d never love another after he passed away.
I was wrong. Love number two was Khairil, who was my course-mate in my second year in university. We just had that one class together, but we hit it off the moment we first met. His death was expected. When I first met him he was already suffering from stage four bone cancer.
I tried my hardest not to love him, but I fell hard and had no choice but to ride the pain, watching him suffer through his illness, and more pain still when he passed away.
He was a science major, loved Star Wars and Star Trek, and could talk for hours about Nicola Tesla, who was his idol. Khairil’s favourite Tesla quote, “One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane,” seems to be quite apt to describe my thought process at the moment.
You would think I’d be wary of love after loving and losing two loves consecutively, yet love number three happened. Partly due to losing love number two.
Love number three was Khairul, Khairil’s identical twin brother. I know. It’s all kinds of wrong, but while sharing comfort with each other after Khairil’s passing, our friendship and caring turned into something more.
Identical in looks, they were poles apart in personality and behaviour. While Khairil was the silent, introverted type, Khairul was the exact opposite with being boisterously extroverted.
Khairul was a consummate athlete and was making a name for himself in badminton—Malaysia’s number one sport. He was making waves and some even hailed him as the next great big thing in the badminton circuit.
He was on his daily five kilometre run when he was hit by a car, just seven months after we laid Khairil to rest.
It took me five years before I let myself love again. I was 28 and a doctorate student in Yale when I fell in love with a young professor.
He received his doctorate degree in philosophy at age 17.
I wasn’t his student. Rather we met at a poetry reading. I could sense from the beginning that he had troubles haunting his mind. For the year and a half that we were together I tried to get him help as well as doing my very best to help him.
But his demons were unbeatable and one cold winter day, when life seemed to be at its bleakest point, “he took his life, like lovers often do, but I could have told you Vincent, this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you,” (such as it was, his name was Vincent too, like in that song).
I don’t know why. Some would call me fickle, the way I kept falling in love, but I think it’s just that my heart is just too big to allow it to be empty for long. Even after four deaths, my heart found love with number five.
Kiven.
I met him at his art show at a local gallery at age 32. He was 27.
He was of Caucasian and Chinese parentage. His mother was Chinese while his father was Irish.
My relationship with Kiven was the shortest relationship I have ever been in, but till today he remains the one that had the strongest impact on me. Maybe it was the intense nature of that relationship that made Kiven stand out the most.
He painted my world with incredible patterns and colours and left me that much more broken when a month after meeting him, he passed away from dengue haemorrhagic fever. It was so sudden. One minute he was fine, and the next he was warded in ICU and died two days after the fact.
After Kiven passed away, I sat down each night and tried to talk to God. Those were the moments when I found neither solace nor comfort in my conversation with God, whom I later postulated was not there anymore, and had not been there for centuries.
I told myself that God or no God, five times of having loved and lost should drive home the fact that love was just not meant for me.
I would have kept to myself forever too, had it not been for the two little angels, Ana and Ani, who lost their mother at birth and found their way into my heart. I met their widowed father at the laundromat. He had the twin girls in a twin stroller while doing the laundry. I was doing my laundry too and felt sorry for him, struggling with the twins who were fussing because they were teething at that moment while still trying to load his laundry in the machine.
I was 35. A year later we were married and I was the happiest wife and instant mother of two. I thought the curse must have been broken, or that God finally decided to show up and make life right for me after having made it as wrong as it could have been previously; I was wrong.
Two months after we built our happily ever after, the dead God took my beautiful family away. Azam, Ana and Ani died instantaneously when they were hit by a lorry on their way home from a doctor’s appointment.
For the millionth time, how I wish I had been with them in that car when their lives ended.
36 and I had buried 5 boyfriends, one husband and two children.
It was the moment I received the news of their fatal accident that I decided that those visions of God expiring had been real projections instead of a troubled mind’s plaything.
If God had been around He wouldn’t have put me through what I went through.
So yes, God is dead.
And we haven’t even come to love number nine.
Love number nine happened exactly on my 37th birthday and ended exactly on my 38th birthday.
His name was Adam. And my name is Hawa (Eve).
It’s ironic that we were both named after the first humans God created and I didn’t believe anymore that God was still around. But for that one year that Adam was in my life, I almost took back my words and thought that perhaps I had been out of my mind thinking that God is dead, because for certain, even after all that pain that I went through, after all those deaths, to be able to have Adam in my life, who was such a gem and blessing of a person, there must still be a God.
Adam was the kind of person that dreams were made off and the kind of person that would make you believe that miracles could happen. And, yeah, for a while there I thought Adam was the reward for all the suffering I went through before him.
All those loves lost must have been to teach me to love better, to love stronger. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
How easy it is to sway one’s convictions when lured with eternal love and unequivocal happiness.
What foolish thoughts.
Today I am 38 and I just buried my ninth and (by the God that is dead), my last love.
Adam was caught in crossfire at a bank robbery that went horribly wrong. Adam was a police officer.
And now he is dead. Like Liam is dead. Like Khairil. Like Khairul. Like Vincent. Like Kiven. Like Azam, Ana and Ani.
All dead.
As dead as the God everyone worships and prays to for strength and courage.
Dead like the God who is supposed to give you hope and comfort.
Dead like all those people starving from poverty.
Dead like all those casualties of all those endless and needless wars.
Dead like all those people who saw no light out of their darkness.
Dead.
Like I am inside.
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Malaysian author Yasleh Hani Wati binti Mat Yassin considers writing as “the spark that kept me going. It is my solace, my place to run to when the world goes wrong and it is the very essence of who I am.”