All images courtesy of author unless otherwise stated.
This Hari Raya, I’m thinking about how grief and I got properly acquainted.
Not just the kind that arrives in tears (though there were those moments), but the quiet one that sticks around like pulut in your teeth.
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The kind that creeps in while watching past Raya videos, the ones with family, pressing play on laughter and voices that no longer fill the room. The kind of grief you can’t hit pause on.
I lost a few loved ones over the past year. A dear friend. Some close relatives. People who once held space in my life and now leave a them-shaped void this Hari Raya Aidilfitri.
But one loss cuts especially deep: my aunt. I’ve been calling her Mak (mother) since I was little because, in so many ways, she raised me like her own. She wasn’t just an aunt. She was a second mother, a compass, a home.
Today, on Hari Raya, her absence feels subtly loud. Like a chair deliberately left empty at the dining table. Not forgotten—just unmistakably not there.
Every Hari Raya, like clockwork, we begin our day at her humble (en-bloc) two-room flat in Tanglin Halt. If you’ve never been, it’s a neighbourhood frozen in time, where the walls hold stories within the cracks that have been here since the ‘80s. The curtains carry a musky scent that, for reasons I can’t quite explain, felt like comfort.
Mak’s festive spread was simple yet sacred. Lontong, sayur lodeh, beef rendang, sambal goreng, ayam masak merah—all the classics, all done right.
But the crown jewel? Her kueh lopes. Sticky glutinous rice, dusted with grated coconut and drowned in thick, dark gula melaka.
It’s the kind of dish you don’t just eat. You have to commit.
This year, there’s no kuih lopes waiting on the table. No warm greeting from that quaint kitchen. Just memories, lingering like a scent you can’t quite place.
The Stickiness of Loss
But here’s what I’m learning: grief and joy aren’t enemies. They can sit side by side—like distant cousins at your uncle’s house, the ones you don’t really keep in touch with but still nod and smile at out of courtesy. Awkward at first, but eventually, you find a way to start the conversation.
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I think back to a RICE Dialogue panel we organised last October, when Anthea Indira Ong and Dr Syed Harun spoke about processing grief. Call it a coincidence, but it was held right after Mak passed.
Grief, I learned, doesn’t always arrive with a bang. Sometimes, it’s gentle. It settles over the day—not to rain on your Hari Raya, but to remind you of what mattered and what you need to cherish.
This Hari Raya is special for another reason: it’s our first one in our new home. And the first with our youngest son, just 11 months old. Old enough to rock an oversized baju kurung and a tiny white kopiah, utterly mesmerised by the rainbow-coloured drape lights I picked up from Geylang Serai market.
The awe in his eyes? Wondrous to witness. Of course, after the awe comes the tugging of the lights. Bro… It took me hours to put them up. Haiz.
Getting the two boys ready felt like wrestling cranky, slippery octopuses into traditional wear. Singing Raya songs loudly (and sometimes off-key) in the car. Somewhere between the exasperation and exhaustion, my wife and I caught each other’s eye, realising: This is our turn now. How far we’ve come after six and a half years of marriage.
We’re stepping into the roles we once watched our parents perform so effortlessly. Only now, it’s different. Multiple checklists on the fridge. Spring cleaning is ‘strategically outsourced’ so we can focus on things no helper can fix—like the perpetual mess on the floor, a war zone of toys. Trying to perfect festive dishes while I iron our outfits.
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Still, I trust we gave our best, for our boys, for our little family.
And I think it’s something we don’t talk about much—how, as Singaporean millennials, we often move away from traditions. We’re busy. We don’t have time to sit for hours over rendang or teach the younger ones how to fold ketupat. It wasn’t a priority.
But somewhere along the way, as we get older, we realise what these things truly mean. It’s not about the perfect kuih lopes. It’s about the legacy we honour when we try, imperfectly, to hold onto the things that mattered to those who raised us.
And in that imperfection, there’s a quiet kind of joy. The kind that doesn’t announce itself. It just… sits next to you while you’re on all fours wiping the floor because someone decided to relieve himself before we could get the diaper on. The mirror image of the grief I’ve wrestled with over the past several months.
Pulanglah
Hari Raya has always been about reunion. About coming home (probably why we have songs like ‘Balik Kampung’ or ‘Pulanglah’).
But with age, you learn reunion also means absence. Not everyone makes it to next year’s Hari Raya photo. You find yourself holding joy in one hand and loss in the other.
With two children of my own, I see it now. I want them to understand what Hari Raya is, not just from photos or stories, but through the very things we do—our rituals, our laughter, even the little squabbles.
These moments are what we pass down. As I try to make my son’s kopiah stay on his head (he’s not having it), I realise I’m doing the same things my parents and Mak did with me. It’s funny how, even without realising it, we start to pick up these threads and carry them forward.
And as I lay out our crisp traditional outfits, hit play on my ‘Eid Mubarak Vibes 2025’ playlist, and adjust the ketupat lights for the tenth time, I realise: Maybe this season is about making room.
Room for what was, and what is. Room to laugh, and still have space to grieve. Room to say their names, out loud, without flinching. Room to build new memories, without replacing the old ones.
Maybe it’s because we start to see that in the things we do for our kids, we aren’t just keeping traditions alive—we’re making sure they don’t forget what came before them.
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We don’t just ‘move on’. We move forward, with them in us. In the Raya dishes we try to replicate. In the lullabies we hum to our children at night. In the quiet moments, when we catch ourselves smiling at something they would’ve said.
This year, there may not be Mak’s kuih lopes on the table, but there’s a semblance of it. There is joy. There is remembrance. And yes, there is still gula melaka—just maybe slightly too runny for my liking.
And maybe that’s enough.
