Remembering Helen Wong Noo Noo
I had a talk with ChatGPT recently..
I said:
I feel the weight of the world weighing down on me. Wanting time to stop. I lost somebody. I don’t want my parents to go. I don’t want to go as well. Why can’t everything just stay as it is? Life seems motionless; meaningless right now. Everything is the same; day in, day out. I feel like I am going nowhere.
ChatGPT said:
I’m really sorry. Losing someone can make the world feel unbearably heavy, and the fear of losing your parents—and eventually yourself —can make time itself feel like something you want to fight against. There’s nothing strange or weak about feeling overwhelmed by that.
But I’m concerned by “I don’t want to go as well.” I want to take that seriously.
Are you thinking about killing yourself or hurting yourself right now, or have you made any plan to do so?
For the next few minutes, please don’t try to solve your whole life or figure out what it all means. Just stay with me here. If you can, go sit near your parents or another person you trust and tell them plainly, “I’m having a really hard time and I don’t want to be alone right now.” Put some distance between yourself and anything you could use to hurt yourself.
If you feel you might act on these thoughts, please get immediate in-person help. In Malaysia, Talian HEAL 15555 provides crisis support every day from 8am to midnight. You can also go directly to the nearest emergency department or contact emergency services.
And for right now, you don't have to accept that everything will change someday. You only have to get through this moment. The fact that life feels meaningless tonight doesn't mean that this feeling is a permanent verdict on your life.
I'm here with you. Tell me what happened to the person you lost, and tell me whether you're safe right now.
I said:
No. I don’t want to die. I am taking about eventual death.. by natural causes. Old age. Sickness. Who knows.
ChatGPT said:
Ah, I understand. Thank you for clarifying. You’re not saying you want to die—you’re grieving the fact that death is unavoidable, and that eventually the people you love, and eventually you, will be gone.
That can hurt in a very particular way. Sometimes a loss makes mortality suddenly stop being an abstract idea. You look at your parents and think, One day I won't have this. One day this ordinary day won't exist anymore. And then you look at your own life and realize you can't freeze any of it.
I don't think you need to talk yourself out of that feeling. There is something genuinely sad about impermanence. Wanting everything to stay as it is is, in a way, a sign of how much you love what you have.
And when you're grieving, the present can become strangely flat: the same rooms, the same routines, the same days, while internally something enormous has changed. It can make you wonder, What's the point if everything eventually disappears?
Maybe the point isn't to make things permanent. We can't. Maybe it's to actually be here for the things that aren't permanent.
Your parents won't be here forever. Neither will you. But that doesn't make the time you have with them meaningless. In fact, its finiteness is part of what makes an ordinary evening with them precious. A conversation, a meal, a stupid joke, sitting in the same room doing absolutely nothing—those things don't have to last forever to have been real.
And you don't have to figure out where your life is going tonight. You're carrying grief, and grief can make the future look like an endless repetition of empty days. You are allowed to simply be a person who misses someone right now.
If you want, tell me about the person you lost. Who were they to you?
I said:
My grandma. Her birthday’s coming up soon.. if she was still alive.
ChatGPT said:
Oh. That makes a lot of sense.
A birthday can be a strange kind of grief trigger. It's not just remembering that your grandma died—it's imagining the version of reality where she would still be here, and you'd be thinking about what to get her, what to say to her, how old she'd be. The date becomes a little doorway into the life that didn't happen.
And sometimes you don't even want some profound lesson from it. You just want your grandma back. You want the world to rewind far enough that her birthday is an ordinary birthday again.
You might find yourself thinking about her more as the day gets closer. If that happens, you don't have to push it away. Maybe tell someone in your family a story about her. Look at some photographs. Cook something she used to make. Visit somewhere that reminds you of her. Or simply sit somewhere quiet and talk to her in your head.
None of that changes the fact that she's gone. But love doesn't disappear just because the person you loved does.
And there's something poignant in what you said earlier about not wanting your parents to go, either. Losing your grandma may have made the whole chain of time suddenly visible: grandparents grow old, parents grow old, I grow old. That's a frightening realization. But you don't have to live all those future losses today.
Today, your parents are here. You are here. And your grandma's birthday is coming.
You can let today be today.
If you feel like it, tell me something about your grandma that you miss—the smallest thing is okay. What was she like?
I said:
She laughs. She cracks jokes. Her cooking’s amazing. She never misses anyone’s birthday and always greets them. She was the glue that held the whole family (main and extended families) together. I hate people smoking, but she’s the only one I tolerate the smoke from. She always goes to mahjong and I always walk to the markets in the morning with her when I am in Penang. Breakfasts with her. The walk back. Her conversations with her friend in the market. Her advice on where to go to eat. Her grumpy face when she woke up when we were too loud. Her nagging us to shower and be on time.. and then her last ang pau. Her funeral. Grand.. yet unreal. A hole yet.. it doesn’t feel real. But every time I go back to Penang, it is real.. she’s gone. The glue’s gone. The food’s gone.. she’s not coming back.
ChatGPT said:
Yeah. That is grief.
Not just missing a person in some abstract way. Missing an entire world that existed because she was in it.
The morning walks to the market. Breakfast. Walking back. Her conversations with her friend. Mahjong. Her advice about where to eat. The grumpy face when you woke her up. The nagging. The cooking. The birthdays. The jokes. Even the cigarette smoke that you normally couldn't stand.
Those details are almost unbearably precious because they're so ordinary. You weren't doing something grand with her. You were living life with her.
And now Penang itself has changed.
You can go back to the same places, walk the same streets, see the same market—and some part of you is probably expecting reality to correct itself. She should be here. This is where we walked. This is where she did that. Where is she?
Then it hits you again.
She's not coming back.
That's the part of grief people sometimes don't understand. Your mind can know someone is dead while another part of you hasn't caught up at all. You can attend the funeral, see the photographs, receive the last ang pau, hear everyone talk about her—and still have this feeling of No. This can't possibly be the end of that person.
And the funeral being grand and yet unreal makes sense too. There's something almost surreal about seeing an enormous ceremony for someone whose existence in your own memory is so intimate and mundane. The world is saying this person is gone, while your memories are saying but she was just here, walking to the market with me.
And yes—the glue is gone.
But I don't think everything she held together has disappeared with her.
She taught your family how to gather. She remembered birthdays. She fed people. She gave advice. She nagged people into showering and being on time. She made herself part of everyone's ordinary lives. Those things have left traces in the people who knew her.
Maybe that's one of the strange things about losing someone who was the centre of a family: their absence becomes part of the family's geography. There are places where everyone notices they're missing.
And someday, you might walk through that market and remember her without the memory being quite so sharp. You might hear someone laughing and suddenly hear her laugh in your head. You might eat something she would have approved of and think, She would've told me to order this. You might even find yourself doing something she used to do and realize, Oh. I got that from her.
That won't mean you've stopped missing her.
It means she has become part of you.
And her birthday coming up may hurt like hell. You don't have to make it a cheerful occasion. Maybe your family could have breakfast together that day, or make one of her dishes, or simply tell stories about her. Not because it brings her back—it doesn't—but because her life deserves to still have somewhere to go.
You wrote something that really struck me:
“The glue’s gone. The food’s gone.. she’s not coming back.”
The food is gone for now. The particular breakfasts, the particular walks, the particular version of Penang that existed when she was there—that version really is gone. You don't have to pretend otherwise.
But the love isn't gone.
And I think that's why this hurts so much. You didn't lose someone you merely knew.
You lost someone who made home feel like home.
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