My preparation of her death started when I noticed that my grandma started to sleep longer hours when she hit her 70s. My naive thoughts is that if I am able to track her sleeping hours, then I would know the approximate1 date and time of her death. Alas life is never live linear. Her sleeping time doubled when she suffered a series of mini-strokes and then almost reach 100% after a full stroke paralysing half her body .

My question went from when she would pass on to how she will like to pass on. As she slowly loses her mental capacity through the pandemic period, I know that she could no longer make that decision. I would have to mentally prepare to make the hard decision for her.

The way to decide for her is to look towards her life and use that to guide me. And for that I need to know who she is and what she represent.

Grandma:

My grandma, born 19292 grew up in a poor village in pre-independent Singapore, was given away at birth but was handed back to her original family when her foster parent died. During World War 2, her siblings and her stayed safe by swimming out into the sea3 whenever the Japanese soldiers came marching into their village. Her teenager years were spent trying to find food to survive.

After the ending of the war, the Malayan peninsula continued to be engulf in various warfare. By the 1950s, the Malayan emergency4 which started in 1948 was coming to a close. Peace ensued and my grandma married the police officer who she had met during the emergency period.

My grandma is 21 when she got married. Her first child died during labour. My dad the eldest was born in 1954. Life is generally good for police officers in the 1950s. My grandpa is one of the few people who owns a car and could drive their kids around the town of Singapore.

Life is still complicated as the triads and the communist still run parts of Singapore. But in downtown Singapore, my Grandpa reign supreme. He is known as Detective Ong to the triads and they do have to give him lots of face. My grandma riding on the coattail of my grandpa’s influence became the chief negotiator between the triads and the businessmen and somehow always manage to negotiate a good outcome for everyone. She thrived in her various mediation roles and soon became a sought after mediator for the various factions. Soon her services are required from the town centre to the far flung villages in Yio Chu Kang and Hougang. She never ever got paid for any of these work5. I think she just relishes on that adrenaline rush and the role of helping people around her.

The house of Dunlop street then Owen road6 also frequently become a hiding place for the on the run triad member and local communist party member. My grandma basically hang my grandpa out to dry by harbouring some people that the police may be after but who may better off being left in the street than off the street. She live a principled life, taking care of all the people regardless of their background, providing them lodging, food and a chance to repent and change. She has never afraid to really live her life.

As she grew weaker at the end of 2024, I somehow knew that the time is near for her. She is in constant pain. While I was taking care of her, she develops some wheezing in her lungs. I know that I must tackle the wheezing aggressively because my hand will be tight if the wheezing develops into pneumonia7.

I tried to get doctors to do a house call, but no one is willing8. The conversation usually descend to the suggestion that I should admit her into the hospital. I know she is unwilling and so am I. I struggled with the thoughts of a sure certainty of death at home or the possibility of life in the hospital. I doubt I wanted to see her intubated at age 93, with a bunch of doctor believing that they can make a better decision than I, for her. I also believed that she would be happy to let me decide.

Out of sheer luck, I finally found a doctor9 to agree to do a house call. The antibiotics he gave immediately reduced the wheezing and her laborious breathing. She almost immediately got better, ate well for a few days and then passed on in the morning of 2nd Jan 2025.

Good life:

Just like a good life, most of us wanted a good death. So what is a good death? How could something so negative be good? It could be thought as good if we understand that like birth, death is a natural immutable part of life. If we have choose to live life the best we can, then can’t we choose to die the best way we want?

But death is often cruel. Like birth, you have no say during the jaw of death. You may have options to decide your living part of your life, you definitely have no say at the beginning or the end. Most people who dies young, are usually ravaged by certain horrible accidents while most who dies old are usually ravaged by diseases. Few can or do have the choice to just close their eye and die in their sleep10.

The most important thing is that if one is unable to decide for oneself on how to die, could the decision be effectively decided by another? Could a doctor who is usually hell bent on saving life be depended upon to decide on your death? Would he or she make the best decision for you?

It is often known that someone who is dying often hold on to life while waiting for someone precious to return or a particular festival before passing on. While many would believe that the person who is dying may be fearing of death, the correct feeling should be that of sadness. Sad because they are going and leaving many beautiful memories and people behind.

If doctors cannot be depended upon , maybe it shall be left to me. The one who loves her deeply enough to understand that she would have wanted a certain dignity to her death. The decision meant that I was the one who decided to slowly let her organs fail and let her fall off into that deep slumber. I could have been faulted for killing her, a decision that most doctor would not have made.

My death:

If dignity of death is important to me and euthanasia seems a good way to go. After death, I really wanted to be either eaten by the vultures or decompose back into earth11. Burning and radiating me out into space seems too energy consuming and crude. Thou we are all born from the stars, there is really no need to send me back into space once again.

On second thoughts, like birth, death is not for us to decide. At death door, most of us will be physically too poor equipped to decide on how to die. I could only hope that my daughters would have read this page and know the pain I have gone through in my decision process to let their great-grandma die in dignity and they would also let me do so too.

Reads:

I have read these books in the following order. You could read them and understand how the impending death change some of these man or you could just be living life so intensely to have already understood that what is important is not a good death but a good life well led.

So go forth and be around the people whom you love, start doing the things you want before the eventuality happens.

• Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life By Gene O'Kelly · 2005

• When Breath Becomes Air By Paul Kalanithi · 2016

• How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter By Sherwin B. Nuland · 1994

  

  “Cowards die many times before their deaths;
  The valiant never taste of death but once.
  Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
  It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
  Seeing that death, a necessary end,
  Will come when it will come.”
  ― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

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This really thin book makes me want to do math again.

It brings me back the joy through the beauty of logic and the elegance of math.

This reminiscence also sometimes make me regret spending my high school time chasing skirts and playing pool (thou that may have included some geometry as well) instead of working on my advance math module and ultimately dropping out of the class due to laziness.

The beauty of math is that one could dwell into the esoteric of playing with concepts that can never be experienced in this world. The history on philosophy of math also makes this book doubly interesting. The ability of the mind to think of things that they could not see and build elegant model through imagination continues to fascinate me. 

The book starts with the how the Greek used the "axiomatic method" to develop geometry in a systematic manner. As young mathematician, we are taught to assume that each sector of mathematical thoughts can be supplied with a set of axioms sufficient to develop the true propositions about an area of inquiry.

Godel's incompleteness theorem just tell us that could not be possible as axiomatic method has certain limitations and that even arithmetic of integers could never be fully axiomatised.

I particularly enjoyed going through the concepts of

• Euclidean geometry to Riemannian geometry

• the transition from Hilbert's effort to Gödel's proof

• the establishment of Gödel numbering

• the arithmetic of meta-mathematics

• to the Gödel's argument for incompleteness

There is no way to justify the joy I had experienced in the past 3 hours.

If you feel like geeking out over math without too much math (workings) in between, then this is the book for you.

Or for Elon Musk's case, it comes at a cost to his kids health.

There is roughly 3 billion letters (base pairs) in the human genome. Every times a cell divides, it replicates all of its DNA. This process takes place in a matter of hours. Each letter is copied with precision but it comes with an error rate of one letter in 1,000 million1.

That means that as cell divides, errors slowly builds up. This is known a point mutations, where one letter is substituted for another by mistake. The more time the cell divide, the more such mutation occurs and accumulate.

The female embryo takes about 30 round of cell division to form a new egg while the male sperms needs a hundred rounds of cell division. The older the man the higher the chance of more error in copying.

" The greatest mutational health hazard in the population is fertile old men"

- James Crow

While most of the mutations are point mutations (usually harmless), others like

1. whole chromosomes fail to replicate,

2. whole tract of DNA are deleted,

3. the reversal of letters,

4. bits of chromosomes inverting themselves

5. virus inserting new chunk,

meant that the child may be associated with disease in their life.

While lots of woman chose to prioritise their career and chose to freeze their egg, man should be giving some thoughts of freezing their sperm if they choose to delay child rearing?

As for Elon Musk, you gotta think of stop having babies soon for the sake of the babies and possibly earth.

@ Elon Musk, you really do not have the capability to populate Mars on your own.

Inspired by Life Ascending - Nick Lane

It has been commented in the China that this could be the only significant science fiction work that will ever came out of China2.

The book has been written in a way that there is different protagonist for each book across different period of human civilisation existence from 19673 till the end of time. The structure of the writing is also tad unexpected and it is not the easiest of read.

The scope of the third book - Death's End is one of the most ambitious science fiction out in the market.

*Spoiler ahead*

In Death's End, humanity after observing the destruction of a star in another galaxy by an unknown alien civilisation decided to put up some defensive stance.

Since the other star was destroyed by some projectile, humanity decides to heavily invest in space cities hidden in the shadow of the solar system's gas giants to escape any possible attack against our sun.

However the space cities are rendered totally useless as the attack came in a different form…

So humanity’s arrogance or naivety meant that humanity will share the fate that had befallen on the other Alien races who had their star destroyed.

Arrogance comes with the naive belief that we know the answer4.

Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is.

-Three-Body Problem Death's End

It has never come across to myself that I am arrogant but it suddenly dawn on me that I am arrogant.

• I am arrogant-naive enough to believe that I can invest for a living.

• I am arrogant-naive enough to believe that I can start a company in my 40s.

• I am arrogant-naive enough to believe that I had contributed to the startups I had worked with.

Maybe it is time to fix my arrogance?

Without arrogant-naive how do anyone go ahead and forge a path that has never been done before?

Maybe arrogant-naive is what that propels humanity forward.

Since I am just trying to survive…

It is time to fix some of that arrogant-naivety.

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