On the evening of Apr. 19, a teenager died from a horrible crash after a car collided with the taxi she was in. 19-year-old Kathy Ong had been among the four passengers — fellow students from the National University of Singapore (NUS) — in the taxi when an SUV crashed right into them at high speed at the intersection of Clementi Road and Commonwealth Avenue West.
Shocking dashcam footage of the moment of impact emerged on social media, showing Ong dangling out of a broken window, nearly flung out of the car following the crash.
The four students, as well as the taxi driver and the driver of the car, were taken to National University Hospital. Ong succumbed to her injuries and was pronounced dead at the hospital. Her three friends remain hospitalized.
Ong was remembered as a fun-loving teen who loved nature, and hundreds of her friends turned up at her wake last Friday and Saturday to pay their condolences at the Church of St Teresa. According to The Straits Times, Ong’s friends noted her to be extremely close to her parents, being the only child.
One can only imagine the pain the teen’s parents are going through — but even in death, the 19-year-old may have provided her parents some comfort. In a poignant tribute to his daughter, Keith Ong shared about the fact that the girl actually composed four poetic paragraphs that imagined her own funeral. Initially thinking that it was “so weird and inauspicious” for a 19-year-old to write about her death, Keith now feels thankful for the piece she wrote and printed it out to display next to her coffin.
This is what she wrote.
“Today is my funeral. A water hyacinth woven coffin (they’re sustainable and biodegradable — I hurt the environment enough while alive) lies in the centre, at the front of a white, glassy wall. There are carefully arranged flowers colouring the place, a warmer softer hue from good-willed acquaintances of the bereaved, my loved ones.
People talk in hushed, respectful comforting voices, conscious of my absence, but they will come to terms with this funeral and relax in a bit, and normal conversation will resume in the presence of others they might not have seen in awhile. A funeral serves as rather efficient gathering. My parents stand close by; they are my biggest sorrow, but I will not get to that. Time is merciless, they think, not at all fair, let alone too fair the way their daughter had lamented, because how could enough be given to them yet so little to their only child, such that they lived to watch her die? If one, however were to believe in destiny, that one’s entitled time was predetermined from the beginning, then maybe there is fairness in that every moment of time felt longer to me than it did for them, or some other reasons related to perception of time.
Everything in this hall has a time limit — the blooming of the flowers, my physical body, people’s presence, and their memory of me. But, me, I am no longer bound by time. Now isolated from the rest of my community, does time still have a purpose for me? From this point on, whether or not I do not know, but I know not time the way I used to before.
I had to take a break before writing this part; though short, writing my own funeral was quite an out-of-body experience, emotionally rather draining. There were a lot of pauses before I wrote, a lot of images in my head, such that those short paragraphs — not that I look at the clock — took me 2 hours to write. And I’ve missed my friends’ request for lunch.”
– Kathy Ong
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