A Funeral in the New Year
Around 1:40 p.m. on the first day of the first lunar month, my 76-year-old third uncle passed away after illness failed to respond to treatment.
In the days that followed, we busied ourselves arranging his funeral. According to our local custom, the body should be encoffined on the day of death; after encoffining, nephews, daughters, sons-in-law and sons keep vigil through two nights. The funeral was set for the third day of the first lunar month, and burial with earth for the fifth day. During this period we had to notify relatives and friends, receive condolence visits, and prepare the banquet for the funeral procession day.
It was the Spring Festival, and we also had to find time to visit relatives and friends for New Year greetings. And every year when paying New Year visits, at the request of some relatives and friends, I diagnose and treat various illnesses for them; this year was no exception. So these days I have been frantically busy and utterly exhausted.
On the afternoon of the fifth day, I finally boarded the high-speed train back to Beijing. Before boarding, a wave of tiredness came over me; I could hold on no longer and fell asleep in the waiting hall, sleeping deeply. When it was time to board, my child and his mother woke me from my deep sleep, and I literally "hurried and tumbled" onto the journey home. Only once on the high-speed train could I truly rest.
Funerals in our rural hometown have a very complex set of procedures; going through them exhausts the whole family. At twenty, I might have complained that the rituals were too cumbersome and elaborate. But now, approaching fifty, I wholeheartedly endorse these rituals. This complex and solemn funeral rite unites the strength of a large family; everyone jointly arranges the funeral and comforts the bereaved, diluting to the greatest extent the grief that a person's passing brings to their closest kin. It also fully embodies the idea proposed by Malinowski, the anthropologist of structural-functionalism, that every social custom has its function.
My third uncle is the third elder I have personally encoffined. After he passed away, my father, fourth uncle, fourth aunt and I immediately bathed him and changed him into his burial clothes; the younger cousins in my third uncle's family, according to custom, knelt before their father and burned paper money.
My third uncle had taken neither water nor food for more than half a month before his death, so when he died he was skin and bones. Before falling ill he had been a strongly built man whom I could not possibly have lifted; but when he died he may have weighed only about thirty to thirty-five kilograms, and I could easily lift him into the coffin. I cannot imagine how painful it must be for a person to go half a month without eating or drinking. Just over a month earlier, my third uncle's appetite and strength were still good, which laid the foundation for him to hold on for so many days; otherwise he might have died after only a few days.
Disease's torment of humankind is extremely cruel. Most of the terminal cancer patients I have seen no longer have the will to live, and only long for a quick release. Before he died, my third uncle told my father that he wished to release himself and escape the pain sooner, but my father urged him not to do so, fearing it would leave a bad reputation for the children.
Euthanasia has not yet been legalized in our country, and people's minds cannot yet accept it. But after witnessing the dying process of many cancer patients over these years, I sincerely hope that our country will legalize euthanasia as soon as possible.
The treatment after my third uncle's cancer diagnosis is truly a long story. Because he himself could not accept TCM or integrated TCM-Western treatment, he could only continue with purely Western medicine. From diagnosis to death he held on for only a year and a half. The earlier chemotherapy had almost no side effects, which lulled him into complacency; after the last chemotherapy regimen was changed, the toxicity increased greatly. The new regimen was used for only one course, and it directly confined him to bed. Having never known his true condition until then, he now knew it; no longer wanting to burden his family, he deep down abandoned his will to go on living.
In a sense, my third uncle was a fortunate man. He passed away on the first day of the Lunar New Year, when almost all relatives had returned to the hometown for the festival, so before dying he saw everyone he wanted to see, including me. When I got home, his consciousness was not entirely clear, but he could still recognize me accurately. The words he spoke to me in broken fragments, I also basically understood. On the day of his funeral, the relatives all came.
These years, the funeral customs in my hometown have changed considerably. The reason is none other than that the young people have all left to make a living elsewhere and cannot take long leave to come home and hold funerals for the elders.
When I was a child, after an elder at home passed away, seven rites of salvation had to be performed, one every seven days (also called a "seven"), and the ancestral tablet had to be enshrined for three years. When my mother died in 2012, we still insisted on performing the seven sevens for her; this also meant keeping vigil for 49 days. But the ancestral tablet could no longer be enshrined and had to be burned on the forty-ninth day.
Nowadays, no one performs salvation rites anymore. On the fifth day after death, after covering the grave with earth and building the tomb, the ancestral tablet and the deceased's belongings are all burned. The funeral is then considered completely over, with nothing further, and the young people can return to the cities to work.
This hurried era gives us not even a chance to slowly dilute the grief of the family. Tao Yuanming wrote: "What is there to say of death? The body rests with the hills. Kin may still feel some sorrow, but others have already begun to sing." Now even the kin can hardly "feel remaining sorrow"; we have become cogs in the machine of society and cannot leave our posts for long. Once the funeral ends, we must return to the fast-paced modern life. Grief and unhappiness can only be quickly digested on one's own; those who cannot digest their bad feelings in a short time find it hard to adapt to this era, and this may be one of the important reasons for the high incidence of mental illness in modern people.
My father has four brothers and four male cousins. According to the tradition of our village, whenever any one of these eight elders or their spouses passes away, I must observe the highest standard of mourning in sackcloth. Now they are all entering old age one after another; the eldest uncle is already 86 this year. It is predictable that over the next ten-plus years I may have to attend more than ten such funerals.
Whether the village funeral customs will continue to be simplified in the future is still unknown. The current funeral requires 16 pallbearers; this time, more than half of those who carried my third uncle's coffin were already over seventy. This generation will pass away one after another, and few younger villagers remain in the village; in a few years the village may not even be able to assemble a complete pallbearer team. Without enough pallbearers, the traditional funeral cannot continue.
Changes in the relations of production have promoted social change, and many traditions will die out within my lifetime, while new customs sufficient to sustain people's spirits have not yet formed. We still need to explore new "ways of peace of mind" suitable for modern people, so that humanity can live more peacefully and happily; hence it is very necessary to develop new culture and new ideas.
After the fertility rate declined, the younger generation no longer has, as our generation did, enough population to uphold tradition. My third uncle had two sons and two daughters; the daughters all have husbands, and there are five paternal nephews. Sons, daughters, nephews and sons-in-law all kept vigil through the night for him, eleven people in all. What is rare is that all eleven of us gathered together this time, not one missing. Through the two nights we stayed together in the mourning hall recalling the funny stories of our childhood.
The rule for keeping vigil in our village is to lay bedding beside the coffin of the departed. This is said to be because it is the last chance to share a room with the departed; but I think the greater function of this custom is to give the spouse and closest kin of the deceased an emotional buffer when facing bereavement. At the same time, the companionship of siblings can ease the pain in their hearts.
The younger generation keeping vigil took turns sleeping, playing cards or chatting on the bedding. The whole vigil was not mournful and weeping, but full of laughter and merriment; we recalled together many amusing stories of our parents' generation, and also our shared childhood memories, so there was nonstop laughter during the vigil. This is the custom in our region of eastern Hubei, especially when the deceased is an elderly elder, because the death of an aged person is regarded as a "happy funeral" in accordance with the natural order.
Such a vigil is an excellent death education and family gathering. In the process we gradually learned to treat death as a matter of course, to better handle the pain of bereavement in our hearts, and in the process to strengthen clan ties and family affection.
Rural people who grow up in this culture face their own death with composure. I have seen off my mother, my father-in-law and my third uncle; without exception, they were all perfectly clear about the procedures of their own funeral and very accepting of this tradition. In their hearts, death is not frightening. Our funeral culture makes everyone believe that after death one simply goes to another world—a warm world where one's ancestors have already opened up territory—and where descendants arrange everything for the departed in that other world; so such a death truly counts as a "rest in peace."
This belief makes the fear that death brings not very intense. Such spiritual support is extremely precious. But such a pillar cannot be established by a few words; it can only gradually form through the long river of life by repeating the same customs and rituals again and again. Once formed, it becomes unbreakable. I believe that people need such a spiritual pillar; otherwise we cannot, deep in our hearts, calmly face the death of ourselves and our closest kin.
The fear of death torments people more than death itself, and this fear often makes people lose their reason. Death is a natural law that humanity cannot resist; our ancestors understood this long ago. A considerable part of human culture revolves around the theme of death, and medicine, religion, literature, philosophy and folklore have all contributed, from different angles, to alleviating humanity's fear of death. If we want inner "peace," we need to draw nourishment from these cultural legacies.