Dedicated to Faridz

“Some of us think holding on makes us strong,

but sometimes it is letting go.”

(Hermann Hesse)

Penang – 13 February 2019

I was hoping wouldn't have to write on this subject after Nur, but I'm forced to do it.

I don't like writing about death.

But there are two reasons that push me to do it: one selfless and the other of pure selfishness.

The altruistic reason is because I got permission from this child's parents after a long chat.

The selfish reason is because I have to pull it out, I can't keep it to myself for long, or my soul goes into self-combustion.

I have to expel all the anger that like a ferocious beast bite and tears my heart.

And love and death are known to walk hand in hand.

Since the time of Empedocles who in 495 BC in Greece theorized how the whole cosmos was governed by the two fundamental principles: philia (love and friendship) and neikos (death and hate).

Then they became Eros and Thanatos, Love and Death, as in the bas-relief of the temple of Aphrodite, where Achilles falls in love with Pantesilea just when he kills her.

Sigmund Freud will make it the gravitational center of his basic “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” of 1920, the basis of all his psychoanalytic theory.

These are the two fundamental drives of the human soul.

It doesn't come out...

I met Faridz the first time in February in 2019, at the IPPT medical center which belongs to my USM university, in Penang. He was with his mother Rozaina Osman.

Faridz and his mother. Penang – 13 February 2019

I was there to take pictures for my book, and he was the only kid in the department.

Faridz was 14 years old at the time, and came from Perlis, in northern Malaysia on the border with Thailand. He was being treated for a nose cancer.

He didn't talk much but he had a hard gaze and a great passion for football.

After the photographs I stay to talk to him and his mother, we took some photos together.

That's all.

But I was pleased to send those photos to the mother so we exchanged phone numbers and kept in touch, even when they were at home.

Even my female doctor friends who worked there occasionally updated me about him.

In March, I learned that he would have to go back for an MRI scan.

That evil bastard did not leave him in peace, and from the nose it had gone to the bones.

So, that day, I went back to find him with gifts: model cars and a ball, his passion.

There is a very personal reason. I remember that when I was a child, younger than his age, every time my mother accompanied me to the hospital to do medical checks after my heart operation, as a reward I wanted small toys, model cars or toy soldiers.

I think it was the very least.

My mother still reminds me of it.

Faridz was bigger, but also his illness.

Penang – 19 Marzo 2019

He was so happy with that ball, even though his mother and father Abu Seman bin Ismail showed it more.

You had to look at him carefully because his was a half-mouthed smile.

I saw him from the doctors' screen, beyond the thick glass, lie down on the mechanical bed with a frightened look, stare at the void at the top, waiting for the doctors to come out to enter the resonance machine slowly.

It was not much different from my gaze at thirty while I was making the same visit to understand the status of my tumor.

Fear has no age, we are all children in front of its face without connotations.

Faridz during magnetic resonance imaging. Penang – 19 March 2019

We had breakfast in the cellar of the medical center, we joked and then I promised him that as soon as he was cured I would go to see him at his house, and we would play Sepak Takraw, our passion.

What nonsense to make promises you can't keep.

This is why I never like to plan or make future talks.

There is only the present, let's stick it on our heads. As the Latins said: hic et nunc – Here and Now.

I haven't seen him since that month, it was March of the same year, but we exchanged messages and photos with his mother, even for his birthday.

Lately he had a swollen side of his neck and was struggling to swallow food. I saw his body deform and thought about that stupid promise.

Let's be clear, I've always been firmly convinced that Faridz could heal, he was a wren child but his eyes were like those of a bull.

Until a few days ago, Tuesday August 4th, when I turned on the phone in the morning, I saw two messages saying the same thing, one from a friend of mine who was a doctor of the IPPT and one from her mother: Faridz died this morning.

The tumor had come to the eye, and maybe to the brain.

Too much also for him.

I haven't stopped crying all day and spitting anger at everything, I would have destroyed my room.

If it weren't for his mother and father. We talked at length, they asked me again for all my photographs of him. They sent me photos of his funeral, and a terrible one of Faridz already dead, lying on the bed, but I will never be able to show it to you: it is a private gift, and in any case it's unsustainable to look at.

I told them that many people, without knowing him, made them condolences and prayed for him.

I asked for permission to write to remember it and they accepted, indeed the father phoned me to give me the latest information.

Only male child, the youngest of five children. Dead at 15 years old.

“Anak Syurga” call them in Malaysia, the “Children of Heaven” because that's where they go.

And breathe a sigh of relief because he no longer suffers and he is in Heaven, indeed in the end they managed to celebrate the feast of Eid ul-Adha together a few days before.

But I can't.

I can't breathe a sigh of relief.

I don't mind knowing that he is in Heaven.

Because he didn't have to go so early.

I feel an unbearable anger.

Because as it was for Nur, and the other children, the substance is always the same:

I'm still here.

And I won't be able to keep my promise.

Never do them. Never again.

Forgive me, Faridz.

Rest in Peace.

Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un

Dedicated to his parents...

Funeral of Faridz. Perlis – 4 August 2019

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