Sow Wan Jing, 20

My mother was badly affected by the recent news on the Ang Mo Kio Avenue 10 tragedy. Her eyes were teary when she made angry comments about how “selfish” and “cowardly” the father was.

Marriage.
The violent end to those two innocent lives of his children is perhaps what’s most heartbreaking about this incident. Each child is a single body, just like what a marriage is meant to be when two lives are melded into one. However, when it doesn’t go well, children are also the ones to suffer the most. There is an old fireman’s adage that goes like this, “Never leave your partner behind, especially in a fire.” I find it very relevant to marriages, especially in today’s context where maintaining a marriage seems trickier than ever and where a divorce is considered “acceptable”. Despite how "troublesome" a marriage may seem, it is usually worth the hard work and commitment; but that's just my two cents worth.

There were various speculation in regards to what might have driven the man to commit murder- cum- suicide, such as financial problems, failed marriage, fear of not getting custody of his children, etc. Indeed, his situation does appear complex. Perhaps like what one of the man’s relatives said in an interview, "You should ask the deceased. All the answers are with him.”

If only people could show so much interest and concern before, not after, the man’s death, this tragedy might not have happened.

Hope.
An outcast student, “talentless”, bad in sports, and unable to excel academically, commits a school massacre before shooting himself in his desperation. A terminally ill patient flees his life of pain and struggles by hanging himself. A bankrupt man facing divorce suffocates and strangles his own flesh and blood, and jumps off the block.

What are they all dying for? Hope is what’s missing.

Hope is the reason to believe in a better tomorrow. It gives us motivation to wake up each morning. Without hope, none of us can survive.

Love seems to transcend distance, differences and various divisions. Similarly, we can always hope to turn bad situations around. Hope is to tragedies what love is to flaws.  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. rightfully said, “We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope.”

This reminds me of something else which my mom has said regarding the Ang Mo Kio Avenue 10 tragedy, that the children probably never thought to die. Indeed, I can imagine that their young hearts were probably still full of hope...

My heart goes out to the man’s wife as moving on will take a lot of courage. However hard it seems to piece back the broken shards of life, let us all never give up.