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When grief gets too much
 On the last day of her life, Ms Kerin Peh, 28, did what she always did. She went to the Cheng Hong Siang Tng temple to pay her respects to the man who was her husband for less than a day.
What was unusual was that she went alone, without a friend or sister who would usually drive her, in a black car, to the Taoist temple in Arumugam Road.
For an hour, she chain-smoked and folded a pile of incense paper to burn as offerings.
Temple custodians said she appeared every day at 4pm. Some days, she would make two trips – one at lunchtime. Dressed casually, she would stand staring at the photograph that adorned the niche of Mr Vernon Leong – decked out in his wedding best – for an hour or so.
Two tiny figurines have been placed in front of his niche: of a man proposing to a woman.
Her death fall last Monday was after a bout of sobbing early in the morning which neighbours heard. It was a sound they have heard occasionally, after she moved back into her family’s four-room Hougang flat early this year.
She plunged to her death, in what looked like a macabre imitation of her husband’s death fall at the Hilton Singapore hotel eight months earlier.
If she had lived another month, she might have heard more about what really happened on her wedding night, Nov 3 last year, as the coroner will begin hearing the circumstances surrounding her husband’s mysterious death.
Friends and family members declined to talk about how the pretty woman had fared in the intervening months, as they said it was “not what she would have wanted”.
But it was clear that all was not well with Ms Peh.
A month after her husband’s death, she apparently tried to kill herself by slitting her wrists while she was living with her in-laws in Balam Road.
The spiral of despair on losing a loved one is something that one woman in her late 40s, who wants to be known only as Ms Yin, knows about. She wrote a book – Why? When Both My Parents Took Their Lives – on coping with the suicides of her parents.
When she was seven, her mother killed herself. In 2006, when she was 45, her father plunged to his death from their flat.
“It was so shocking and so painful that for a while I thought maybe it would be best to go the same way to ease the pain,” she told The Sunday Times.
Overwhelming grief
Grief counsellors say the more traumatic the death, the stronger and deeper the grief experienced by those left behind.
Ms Ho Shee Wai, director and registered psychologist of The Counselling Place, said it is part of the grief reactions that the bereaved person feels a compulsion to imitate the deceased and want to be with them.
Ms Peh went from a tremendous high to the depths of grief. She was in the bathroom of their wedding suite when her husband unaccountably left the room, and she sounded the alarm when she emerged and found him missing. The next thing she knew, he was found dead in the hotel driveway.
Said counsellor Joan Swee, of Wicare, a support group for widows: “It was such a happy day and there may be no way for her to know what happened.”
Added Ms Helen Yong, head of residential services at the Singapore Mental Health Association Bukit Gombak Group Home: “People need answers in order to get closure and move on after grieving. If it’s difficult to get closure, it can be very hard to come to terms with the loss.”
A year leading up to her wedding, Ms Peh was on an online bulletin board exchanging tips with other brides-to-be on choosing wedding packages, photo shoot venues and games to play on the groom and his best men.
The couple had also received the keys for a new flat in the Sengkang/Punggol area.
Friends remembered the couple’s wedding – a 10-course Chinese banquet in the Hilton ballroom – as a joyous and light-hearted one.
Getting professional help
Would grief counselling have helped?
Counselling for the bereaved usually involves listening, empathy, and creating a safe space for the bereaved to cry or express anger and grief.
Dr Samuel Cheng, senior consultant in the department of psychological medicine at Changi General Hospital, said that normal grief does not need any professional intervention as it is part of a natural process.
He added, however, that if grief is overly intense, prolonged, or complicated by an inability to accept the death as well as suicidal thoughts, then professional help should be sought.
He cited a study that shows that in patients with complicated grief, 65 per cent of the subjects acknowledged thoughts of wanting to die.
There is no indication whether or not Ms Peh went for any counselling, even after previously slitting her wrists.
While attempted suicide is a crime punishable by imprisonment for up to one year, or with a fine, or both, The Sunday Times understands that there is no compulsory counselling for those caught.
The Samaritans of Singapore’s (SOS) executive director, Ms Christine Wong, however, said it is not common for people to attempt or commit suicide after the death of a loved one.
In many cases, a number of overwhelming contributing factors lead to the suicide. She added: “Feelings of desperation and hopelessness are more accurate predictors of suicide.”
When the worst isn’t over Counsellors said that grief is most intense at
between three and six months after the death, when reality sinks in.
Ironically, this is when the support network of friends and relatives usually thinks that the worst has passed.
For sales and marketing manager, Irene, 45, real grief hit her a year after her husband killed himself in 2001.
Her family thought she had recovered and started leaving her alone. But at night, she cried constantly.
“One night, I looked at my two young children sleeping and thought, maybe we
should all go and be with Daddy. And then I realised how dangerous my thoughts were,” she recalled.
She ran into another room and locked herself in there all night to prevent herself from harming her children. The next morning, she made an appointment to go for counselling.
Irene feels grief counselling is necessary for the bereaved, who should not feel
ashamed to seek it.
“Your family can give you company and warmth, but they may be going through the same thing. Professional counselling gave me guidance and helped me take steps in the right direction,” she said.
Ms Swee, who lost her own husband to cancer and a brother to suicide, believes that therapy can do only so much.
She said: “At the end of the day, clients need the love and support of family and friends, who will let them heal at their own pace.”
Ms Peh’s neighbours said her friends visited her regularly in the evenings and on weekends, even when she was living with her in-laws.
Retiree Ho Shin Lung, 70, who lives in Hougang, said: “You could hear talking and laughter coming from their home late at night.”
She would go out, dressed casually, usually accompanied by her sister.
One neighbour also saw her walking her dog, a shetland sheepdog, in the neighbourhood one evening.
Ms Peh was so fond of the dog that she took it along for her wedding photo shoot last June.
In recent months, Ms Peh was also seen out in the morning in work clothes, returning only in the evening.
Last Friday, a solemn party of family members and friends turned up at Ms Peh’s funeral at the Bright Hill Columbarium.
Later that afternoon, her family carried her ashes to their final resting place – in a niche she had bought for herself – right next to her groom’s.
A mother’s pain
 One person who could not go on living after a loved one died was property agent S.F. Lee. She was 45 when she killed herself in 2007.
Four years before, her 19-year-old son, Dao Jing, had been attacked and killed by a five-man gang in Chinatown. One was eventually jailed, another died and the other three were never found.
Friends, who knew her as Pearlyn, said the divorcee never recovered from her loss. Hair stylist Fanny Liu, 41, said Madam Lee would talk about her son in a manic way and mention going to “be with him”.
She suffered from insomnia and started taking sleeping pills.
Said Ms Liu: “She told me nothing was working out for her, from her job to relationships and she would be better off dead.”
Madam Lee, who had three children, was brought down from a high. When Dao Jing reached 18, he decided to leave his father to live with her. She was elated.
Said Ms Liu: “She used to ask him whether he would look after her when she grew old. He would always smile and say: If I don’t look after you, who will I look after?”
But a year later, Dao Jing was found lying face-down in a pool of blood on a staircase landing at a Chinatown shopping centre. He died of his injuries in hospital.
After his death, Madam Lee put all her energy into finding his killers. She put up a $10,000 reward through the Crime Library in 2006 for information.
Said Crime Library’s founder Joseph Tan: “As time passed and no information was found, she started feeling helpless. I saw her about two weeks before she died and she was very emotional, saying she felt there was no hope.”
Ms Liu said that after Dao Jing’s death, Madam Lee had a brief respite from grief. She had a couple of boyfriends and found a job as a property agent at the start of 2007.
Friends also kept her company late into the night. “She could laugh with us, but we didn’t talk about serious things,” she said.
But she broke up with a man she had been attached to and then found that work did not yield much of an income.
By then, she was renting a room in Ang Mo Kio.
In June 2007, she was found dead in her bed in her Ang Mo Kio flat.
Beside her, a bottle of wine and some pills.
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