Day 2: Visit from the Next of Kin

思然 oce
6 min readSep 20, 2022
Photo by juan pablo rodriguez on Unsplash

Day 0: I touched a dead body
Day 1: The dead body image stuck in my head

Sometime in the middle of the night, I checked my watch (it’s a smartwatch) and saw a message from her brother, saying he would take the train tomorrow, arriving at 2:19 pm and would be staying for 19 mins.

I was like, 19 mins? This level of precision was kind of weird.

Then in the morning when I woke up, I could not find the message.

I checked SMS, WhatsApp, telegram, and signal, but nothing.

SO I DREAMT about it??

I got a call from her brother and he said the train was disrupted by the Queen’s funeral, so he would be arriving at 5ish.

So I definitely just dreamt about it.

I know I was quite stressed about this situation and dreaming about it probably confirmed my stress.

My housemate was quite emotionally affected by the situation, so she went to stay with her friends. She asked if I am okay by myself. While I am not very comfortable being in the house with a stranger man and the circumstance would also be very awkward, I felt she really needed a break from the house so I said I should be okay by myself.

K’s friends were not able to make it to the meeting.

In the afternoon, I zoomed with two of my best friends, one still in Hong Kong but the other in Japan. And chatting a bit, I cried.

I actually only cried shortly while meeting K’s friend on the night of discovering the body. After all, while K was more than an acquaintance, she was not really a friend yet. It probably is a good thing for me.

Crying and letting out my anger and frustration and confusion and conflicts helped so much.

I knew someone is dead. But I worried about the rent. I worried about the need of looking for a new place.

But I should not be thinking about those things. Someone was dead.

But I couldn’t help.

And also seeing the dead body was something that left me with an emotional scar…

But so far I have not had the time to inspect my own feelings.

思然 oce

PhD | Research Psychologist | Psychometrician | Computer Science Teacher | IT Auditor/Consultant | ex-CISA/CISSP | Top Writer in Humor | Work in HK, UK, USA