i often dream about my deceased paternal grandmother. usually, she conveys messages the same way she used to speak to me when she was alive - tacit but sentimental. this year, she told me to make sure to bring my husband to pay respects to her on qingming. this is unusual because my husband is malay-muslim, and while he has accompanied us to visit the buddhist columbarium a few times, there was never any insistence from my dreams to push him to visit. but in this dream, my grandmother said to make sure he had to come by this year.
so i did take my husband for the visit, and it turns out that the day we went, cars weren’t allowed to be parked in the columbarium. there was a very long queue of cars dropping off passengers to simply enter the columbarium, and we estimated we’d likely have to wait at least an hour or more just to enter, judging from the traffic trail. this is when my husband (who sort of remembered the dream) offered to hold the car at the back of the columbarium where there was no traffic, by the road. we could then enter the columbarium without waiting and the car wouldn’t be chased away because there was a driver (him) holding the car. it was a small incident but it made me wonder if every action could already be seen, calculated and resolved, in my grandmother’s realm.
Euginia Tan, Singapore
[loved one]