It was with shock that I received a message from a friend announcing that her mum passed away last week due to a heart attack. So today, my family drove down to Western Sydney to attend the funerals.
Death is a part of life, as we grow older, we are loosing more and more family and friends. But still, every single time is such a sad feeling no one can get used to.
When we were young, we don't really think about it, we take it as if it never happens. But the reality is that our presence in this universe is just ephemeral. Back when I was at uni, I've lost two friends, we were young back then, it didn't prevent anything.
My wife had a difficult life since childhood, living with her siblings in a forest while without their parents for a couple of years. We now always try to live a relaxed type of life doing what we like to do, we cherish our freedom. Today, we live in the countryside, pretty far from the Vietnamese community but that is our choice, we wanted to stay away from the community headaches, no one to judge the way we wanted to live our life.
My childhood had been happy, I always had all I needed or wanted, or at least I felt like so. But there is a balance in everything, my happiness was the result of my parents' effort. We were a poor family back in Lao. We eventually had the opportunity to all move to New Caledonia. My parent didn't speak a word of French but to survive they had to work and communicate in whatever way possible. They are tailors, they've been working day until late night (sometimes up to 2 am) to make ends meet. They saved up for my education and to send me to France for studying at uni. A couple of years ago my dad almost died in a heart attack, my mum survived a uterus cancer last year.
Life is short and we only have one. I've always tried to live life fully. When I met my wife, she was still studying in London. She was struggling with the study and working to afford the cost of living in an expensive city. When I moved from France to London, I left my job and my friends behind to join her. I was working as a web developer for a large local computer store. For the first several months in London, I worked in Lidl, a supermarket for only 5 GBP an hour. I couldn't get a job in computer science yet, so had to take whatever job to make ends meet. My first job in web development kickstarted me and I progressively climbed up the career ladder and ended up working for FT.com. As I got better jobs, I supported my wife with her study and told her to stop working so she could focus on studying. She was learning accounting for an ACCA. It wasn't easy, she was in her 30s. At that age, I wasn't really in the mood for studying myself, so I know how hard it was. I've always told her that I would support whether she decides to continue studying for as long as needed or if she wanted to quit and start looking for a job. Life is too short to force ourself struggling doing something we don't enjoy anymore. Having failed the exams a few times, she got too stressed out and it was affecting her health, so she decided to stop after two years and started to work for a little company.
We met our friend in London, she was there on working holiday VISA from Australia. When her VISA expired, she went back Down Under and offered to help me get a Skilled VISA because she was working as an immigration solicitor. It took us a few years to get the VISA approved and we made the move 6 months later. Once again, I left everything behind and moved on to a new country. We knew it was the right decision, the situation in Europe was going downhill, we had to take the opportunity and that we've never regretted it even if we miss Europe a lot.
Saying goodbye to our friend's mum reminded us again to cherish our life, our health and the ones we love. Each minute in this world is precious, anything can happen at any time.
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