A rare "Jenny sighting"

I spent much of today’s Sunday mass looking at another woman. I couldn’t help not looking. She was seated two rows to the front and about two o’clock to the right, so I could see only her left side profile. I swore it was Jenny. She looked every bit like her. The resemblance from the angle where I was seated and even the closeness of her facial tone and complexion was totally uncanny.

She even wore her hair in the same way as Jenny, shoulder length with a hint of brownish tint. Jenny was a little more slender and petite but otherwise, from her side profile and the sleeveless black blouse she was wearing that is so identical to the one that Jenny often wore, I was half wondering if my late wife had a long-lost twin sister or a clone out there. And per chance, I would stumble upon her this fateful day.

The kids and I were attending Sunday Mass at the Church of the Holy Cross in the Clementi estate, for our very first time. Our own church at Bukit Batok was celebrating its Feast Day, an annual food and fun fair event that meant that all the parking spaces would be reserved for setting up the food and games stalls. We circled around the neighbourhood in search for parking but to no avail. My boy W checked out the mass times at the Holy Cross which is the next nearest church, a 10 minutes’ drive away and viola, we could get there with time to spare.

And shortly after settling into the pews, this lady who is probably around Jenny’s age and looking so much like her, caught my eye. Thus far since her passing on, during Sunday masses, I could only conjure Jenny’s visage amongst the parish, seated beside me or a few seats away with the kids in between us. But this time there was no need to put my imagination into overdrive. She was there in the flesh. This someone, with side features so similar to that of my late wife’s. I wanted to move up  to her to take a closer look if I could. But that would be outrageously impossible. Not in the middle of Mass. Also because she was seated with another man. Middle-aged, in all likelihood her husband. And the young lady on her other side, most likely her daughter.

So it was definitely not Jenny. But another man’s wife.

The sight of someone with such incredible physical alikeness to my late wife, seated with another man was somewhat unsettling. I had to blink hard to tell myself it was not a bad dream. Still, distracted as I was, I could recall the priest, a man of advanced years speaking about aging. He shared that at 74 years of age, he is more senior than most of his peers and he spoke also about how we will all one day die and that it was God’s plan to return us from ashes to ashes. Much of the rest of his Homily settled into the common theme of God’s salvation like many other sermons I have heard so frankly there was not anything new or earth shaking to take home with. In any case, my chief motivation to attend church is to be with the family. And Jenny would be extremely unhappy if I did not. In death she still has a hold on me. Perhaps even stronger than ever before. Mass is a time when I am in closest communion with her.

But today, for the first time, amid a new and unfamiliar parish, I thought I caught a rare sighting of Jenny. Resurrected in the flesh as a person. I have to remind myself that it was not her. Just another stranger, with a different family, a different life nothing in common with mine. The real Jenny of mine is gone, kept alive only in my mind and memory. And that of my kids and her parents and siblings.

How many more Jenny sightings will I be getting in future? I am not sure. The mind plays tricks in strange and unpredictable ways every now and then and in my fragile state, constantly dreaming and thinking of her, I stood to be easily fooled.