We have this oft repeated statement that your birth, wedding and death are the three most important events in your life.
For the first, we tend to have very little conscious memory, though by digging through the recesses of our cerebral storage, we might find incidents both pleaasant and unpleasant. I have never cease to marvel at the imprints that incidents can make in your mind, and how a trigger can help you recall a smell, a touch, a taste, a sound.
In our early adulthood and for the rest of our lives, we will be getting invites from friends, acquaintances and strangers. From your twenties onwards, especially between mid twenties to mid thirties, you get an influx of wedding invitations from your peers,sometimes in such abundance that you can choose between going to a church wedding, a wedding dinner, a Malay kenduri and Indian temple ceremony within the space of one day. This of course is also the age when everyone will start asking as to when your turn will be. Perhaps it is great to be married, perhaps it is not. As with every part of life, there are ups and downs, boredom and exhilaration.
Then, you get invited to parties celebrating the various stages of their offsprings' infancy.
As your temple starts greying and you are assailed with various minor ailments that often get blown out. When you start worrying about your cholesterol and blood pressure. When you wish your kids would quickly become independent so that you need not be the tree where money grows on. You start reading about your peers in orbituaries. You begin to get an ever increasing amount of funerals to attend just as the wedding invites peter off, with occasional invites from those a decade or more younger than yourself.
You still get invited to parties celebrating the various stages of their offsprings' infancy. Perhaps you do the same with your children and grandchildren, after you capitulated to the conventions of marriage and popped out kids who go on to have kids of their own. Or you might just eschew the entire institution of marriage and adopt your children (or have them out of wedlock), but then, the flexibility of such arrangements depend on your social and economic circumstance. Or you might choose to lead a life of solitude, spouseless and childless.
The circle of life continues as you grow wrinkled and frail. If you are lucky, the Grim Reaper might decide to come before your earthly body fails you completely.
And then, what?
