Through Thick and Thin, For Better or Worse

I came to take an interest in Singapore's Power Family, Lee Kuan Yew and family, after the initial exposure in Malaysian Studies sessions, when Mrs P would go on and on about how amazing Lee Hsien Loong was. How well educated all three of LKY's children were. And then later on, after some input from Bao, how pretentious Lee Wei Ling's weekly column in the NST was in Singapore - and how I can almost conclude that all neuro people are potentially just....weird.

And yet throughout all this, I had somehow managed to omit the presence of Mrs. Lee, despite the fact that she was on par, if not a step ahead of her husband, and her well-read children. It was only till recently through some mindless surfing and procrastinating on the net that I came across Lee Hsien Loong's eulogy for his mother, and subsequently Lee Wei Ling's.

But it was essentially Minister Mentor Lee's eulogy for his wife that brought a tinge of sadness deep within.

Reading through his reminisces of their times together that tracked all the way back from Singapore moments to relocating to Cambridge to read law, to marrying in secret, to all that they had managed to achieve before returning to Singapore, I couldn't help but feel copious amounts of envy. I remember reading somewhere once, when LKY recounted that the Western perception of marriage was to marry someone you love, and the Eastern way of looking at things was to love the person you had married - and that in this lifetime he had tried to do both.

And my bubble of cynicism burst, and I felt an overwhelming wave of sadness, when I realised that this was exactly how my grandmother must have felt when my grandfather passed on.

When you have spent more than three quarters of your life with someone, how easy is it to let go and continue living the rest of your life on your own again?

And then another bubble of doubt resurfaced, and I remembered the last scene in '500 Days of Summer', when Summer was telling Tom how she woke up one day and she just KNEW.....for sure, about what she had never been sure of when she was with Tom.

Hmm.....so through thick and thin......for better or worse.

What are the chances that everyone will end up like LKY and Mrs. Lee?