FOR ten years, the phone didn’t ring. No visits. No questions about my children, my work, the ordinary textures of a life being lived four hours away in Kuching.
I told myself this was neutrality – the natural drift of adults with separate lives.
Then I learned what silence had been hiding.
My name had been traveling without me. Through family gatherings I wasn’t invited to, over coffee I wasn’t offered, in WhatsApp groups I’d never seen.
The stories they told weren’t true, but they were consistent. I was the villain in a play I didn’t know I was in. The absence hadn’t been neutral. It had been editorial.
Your body knows things before your mind does. I’d wake some mornings with my jaw clenched, shoulders high, without knowing why.
The nervous system doesn’t distinguish between a tiger in the grass and your name in someone else’s mouth. Both register as threat. Both cost you sleep.
The Mathematics of Poison
The Dhammapada teaches: “Better to walk alone than with fools; let one walk alone, committing no sin, at ease like an elephant in the forest.” This isn’t about superiority. It’s about survival math.
Neuroscientist Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett’s research on chronic stress shows that relationships requiring constant threat-assessment – Will they attack today? What did they say about me this time? – produce the same cortisol patterns as living in a war zone.
Your immune system weakens. Your focus fractures. You’re not paranoid. You’re just metabolically exhausted from being ammunition.
The Daoist concept of wu wei – effortless action – applies here with surgical precision. Sometimes the most powerful action is the one you don’t take.
The door you don’t knock on. The defense you don’t mount. The family gathering you finally, quietly, stop attending.
Islamic teaching is explicit on silat al-rahim – maintaining family ties is sacred obligation. But Islamic jurisprudence is equally explicit: الضرر يزال – harm must be removed.
When the tie becomes a noose, cutting it isn’t betrayal. It’s fardhu – necessary, like removing a rotting limb to save the body.
What Silence Teaches
My children don’t know their aunts and uncles. This bothers people.
“Family is family,” I hear. The Malay proverb: Biar mati anak, jangan mati adat – better the child dies than tradition.
But there’s an older wisdom underneath: Adat bersendi hukum, hukum bersendi Kitabullah – tradition rests on law, law rests on the Book. And the Book says: harm must be removed.
What are my children learning from this absence?
They’re learning that malu – dignity – isn’t just about not shaming others. It’s about refusing shame that isn’t yours to carry.
They’re learning that hormat – respect – flows both ways or it’s just takut – fear with better posture.
They’re learning to audit relationships the way a longhouse audits rice stores: Does this nourish or does this rot?
Some inheritances are curses dressed as obligations. My children are learning they don’t have to carry what I put down.
The Grief No One Names
You don’t grieve the siblings you have. You grieve the siblings you never had.
You grieve the family that lived in your head – where phone calls came without subtext, where your child’s first word was shared with joy instead of weaponised later, where blood meant safety instead of surveillance.
That family never existed. But its ghost still wakes you at 3 AM, asking what you did wrong.
The answer is: You existed loudly when they needed you quiet. You built something when they needed you to fail so they could feel sufficient. Your crime was refusing to be small.
Grief is metabolic work. Your body has been spending energy on vigilance – tracking who said what, crafting the perfect defence you’ll never get to deliver, bracing for the next betrayal.
When you finally stop, that energy floods back confused. For weeks it becomes crying in the shower.
Anger that tastes like copper. The strange vertigo of realizing the war is over and you’re still alive.
Then, slowly, it becomes building.
The Practice
Not forgiveness. That’s between them and God, and none of my business.
This is what you do in the space after the door closes:
Name what you’re grieving. Write it once: “I am grieving the siblings I deserved but never had.” Read it. Burn it. Let the smoke carry what words can’t.
Audit the voice in your head. That critic saying you’re difficult, ungrateful, the problem – whose voice is that? If it sounds like them, it’s old code. Delete it manually. Every. Single. Time.
Choose people with your eyes open. Not replacements. Not projects. People who repair after conflict instead of collecting grievances. Presence without scorekeeping. Consistency across years.
Let your children see you whole. Not the details – they don’t need your wound as their inheritance. They need to see that you chose peace over performance, dignity over acceptance, silence over poison.
Some doors close themselves. The wood swells. The hinges rust. The lock turns from the inside.
Your only job is to stop forcing them open.
Turn around. The forest is still wide. The path was always yours. Walk.
The views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Sarawak Tribune.
