Minister Mentor (MM) Lee Kuan Yew says the stress of his wife’s illness is harder on him than the stress he faced during his years in politics.
MM Lee spoke of his wife, Kwa Geok Choo, 89, in an interview on the New York Times’ Saturday Profile.
The couple met each other when they were law students in London and have been together for 61 years.
He shared that his most difficult moment is at the end of each day as he sits by the bedside of his wife who has been unable to move or speak for more than two years.
“She understands when I talk to her, which I do every night,” he said. “She keeps awake for me; I tell her about my day’s work, read her favourite poems.”
“I told her, ‘I would try and keep you company for as long as I can,” before adding, “I’m not sure who’s going first, whether she or me.”
MM Lee added that while he tries to keep busy, from time to time in idle moments, his mind goes back to when they were up and about together. To calm himself, he meditates for 20 minutes at night.
“The problem is to keep the monkey mind from running off into all kinds of thoughts,” he said. “A certain tranquility settles over you. The day’s pressures and worries are pushed out. Then there’s less problem sleeping.”
The New York Times report also noted how younger people worry him with their demands for more political openness and a free exchange of ideas, secure in their well-being in modern Singapore.
“They have come to believe that this is a natural state of affairs, and they can take liberties with it,” he said. “They think you can put it on auto-pilot. I know that is never so.”
The kind of open political combat they demand would inevitably open the door to race-based politics, he said, and “our society will be ripped apart.”
Singapore’s eldest statesman also reflected on his political career and said he wasn’t perfect.
“I’m not saying that everything I did was right but everything I did was for an honourable purpose,” he said. “I had to do some nasty things, locking fellows up without trial.”
1 comments:
LKY knows the danger of race politics because he himself used it when he was a small opposition party leader. he is smart enough not to let others do to him what he did to others.
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