I haven't been posting for a couple of days partly because I was eagerly following the news report recently of a mother and her son's corpse found floating face-down while holding on to her son, right in Singapore's Bedok Reservoir. They are respectively 31-year-old Madam Tan Sze Sze and three-year-old Jerald Chin Le Hui.

What ultimately drives someone to the brink of suicide, even contemplating on doing this act with their own children who might not even be too young to understand what went wrong with their parents. What could have went through both mother and son's mind when their lungs were rapidly filled with water, what with the mother trying not to surface to breathe or even scream for help and young Jerald's mind as he could probably be trying to break free from his mother's grasp from all that's happening.

Marriage is forever and till do us part in death. And even though both Madam Tan and her husband had marriage woes, it's totally selfish to just seek death with her son in tow. Little Jerald has such a long and bright future ahead of him, considering that he's only a mere 3-year-old child. Even if it comes to the point where both parties in a marriage has to settle for a divorce, it shouldn't have come to 2 deaths, with 1 being wrongly cast into the shadows of the dead.

Sometimes when I come across such newspaper reports, I cannot help but wonder. Exactly what were these people, especially the one who committed suicide was thinking when they did such an act with their own child whom they carry in their womb for so many months only to snuff out a small live due to another person's infidelity or mistakes. I believe no one has the right to take away someone else's live even if they're on the brink of despair.

And the worst heinous act of this atrocity? TNP happily reported how little Jerald's playmate was struggling through his untimely funeral. What in the hell is wrong with TNP? This is a family grieving for lost loved ones, a family who needed final closure in the darkest moments of their lives. And there TNP were, gleefully snapping photos of Shaun Tan (Jerald's cousin and playmate) struggling to hold back his tears as he performed the final rites for his dead cousin. This is not something a child this young has to go through at an early stage. Losing someone they loved and cared about, and to make this process even more difficult, photographers snapping photos because they needed to do a report.

Can't the media at least grow some sort of brain tissue in their head to at least do a private interview while at the same time being mindful that there is a family grieving for 2 lives that cannot be returned? Even if there is a need to fulfill their reporting duties, couldn't they have at least published this news on the Internet instead of splashing it out on the front page of a dumb tabloid newspaper, dearly titled TNP?

Please TNP, have some respect for the dead and their grieving family.

For full news report, go to News Report @ AsiaOne

Labels: Bedok Reservoir drowning, Jerald Chin Le Hui, Shaun Tan Jun Wei, Tan Sze Sze