My brother-in-law remarried eighteen months after my sister died. She was only 34. It was a car accident on the highway, during one of those miserably wet Klang Valley mornings, when the rain had started at 5:30am and didn’t stop for the whole day. Bad visibility. Slick roads.
I was having breakfast when my brother-in-law called with the news.
At the funeral, her husband cried hard and openly. I think his tears didn’t stop for the entire day.
Yet, eighteen months later, he was already married to someone else. People had noticed another woman in his life shortly after the funeral. He’d started dating her about six months after my sister died. Everyone drew the conclusions that people draw and gossiped about it:
That he’d moved on way too quickly.
Maybe he’d never loved my sister as much as we thought.
Maybe this was the “skandal” chick stepping in.
We didn’t know his grief
Last month, my sister’s closest friend called me. She sounded nervous. We talked for over an hour, catching up, sharing our grief, lightening our burdens a little. Of course, somewhere during that overdue catch-up, my brother-in-law and his new wife came up.
The friend went quiet for a long moment then said, “You know he spent a year blaming himself for her death, right?” I didn’t understand. “That morning, she was running late for work. The rain, the wet roads, the warnings were on the radio. He begged her to wait a little.”
I sighed. I knew my sister. She refused. Didn’t want to be late for work because of a big client meeting at the hotel she worked at. Anyone who knew my sister knew that her time management skills were not the greatest, and once she decided she was late? Nothing was going to change her mind.
She got into her car, drove, and then she died.
For the next year, he couldn’t stop thinking about that morning. He kept asking himself the same questions. What if he had argued harder? Taken her car keys? Done something, anything, to keep her from getting behind the wheel.
Guilt isn’t rational. It does not care who was actually responsible. He’d convinced himself that if he’d tried harder somehow, his wife would still be alive.
The new wife knew my sister
Then she told me something else: His new wife wasn’t some stranger who appeared after my sister died. The three of them had met at Sunway University and stayed close. They were best friends.
She had been one of my sister’s bridesmaids. She would have been the Maid of Honor, but she had other commitments and couldn’t take on the role, so she gave it up. She had been at the funeral, behind the scenes, organizing things and staying out of the spotlight. She’d spent months checking in on him, supporting him through his grief.
“Somewhere along the way,” my sister’s friend said, “they stopped carrying that pain alone.”
The rest of us?
We were too busy being angry and quietly judging how he grieved.
I thought I’d lost two people
I called Sharizal for the first time in a few months. He picked up on the first ring. It was supposed to be just a quick, five-minute chat. It turned into a conversation that lasted almost two hours.
We talked about my sister. Really talked about her. For the first time since she died.
He told me stories about her final year that I had never heard. I told him stories about our childhood, university orientation, family holidays, and the ridiculous lengths she used to go to just to avoid admitting she was wrong about something.
A week later, we met up for teh tarik at Jasimaa in TTDI. Her favourite mamak. The same place she used to drag all of us after midnight whenever assignments, relationships, or life itself became too much for herself or one of us. We stayed until nearly one in the morning.
We’ve met there every few weeks since. Sometimes his wife joins us too. Between the three of us, it feels like there are fewer pieces of her missing from the table.
I still think about her whenever we sit there. Sometimes, for a few hours, it feels like she’s less gone, like she’s still part of the conversation.
My sister would complain that we’re all sitting at her favourite mamak with empty glasses, then order another round of teh tarik herself.
I thought I had lost my sister and brother-in-law at the same time.
I’m glad I was wrong about one of them.
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Read also: ‘I gave up my family to pursue my dreams’ Shares 34 YO M’sian woman – In Real Life
https://inreallife.my/i-gave-up-my-family-to-pursue-my-dreams-shares-34-yo-msian-woman/
‘I gave up my family to pursue my dreams’ Shares 34 YO M’sian woman
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