In Memoriam: The Fourth Anniversary of My Mother's Passing

From the evening of May 2, 2012, into the morning of May 3, my mother—who had suffered from various illnesses for several decades—entered the final moments of her life. In those last hours, our whole family kept vigil at her bedside. By then I was effectively acting as the head of the household: I held the authority over every major and minor decision in the family, bore all its expenses, and, as my mother's last physician, carried out emergency rescue treatment on her.

Around midnight my mother had slipped into heart failure, breathing rapidly, exhibiting the sign recorded in the classical texts of Chinese medicine known as "clutching at clothing and groping the bed" (xún yī mō chuáng), her consciousness clouded and no longer able to recognize those around her. She still responded only to me, occasionally able to cooperate with a brief physical examination. The last words I remember my mother ever saying to me had come two days earlier, during a phone call: after a few sentences she ran out of strength and told me, "Son, I have no energy left to talk; you speak to your father." She then handed the phone to my father. After that I never had another chance to say a word to her; by the time I rushed home from Beijing, my mother was already unconscious. During her brief rally of lucidity before death, she called out only once to my father, "Old man," and then, in my arms, she finally stopped breathing.

Within minutes of my mother's death, I fainted away from overwhelming grief. After the funeral, we observed the traditional mourning rites—seven weeks, forty-nine days—and at the moment we burned her spirit tablet, I collapsed a second time; it was my father-in-law who raised me up. Two years later, I once again personally laid to rest another loved one—my father-in-law, who died of a third stroke. Before he died he developed a severe pulmonary infection, and I strained every last ounce of strength, hoping to keep him alive until my wife, my sister-in-law, and my brother-in-law could all rush home. Even that I could not manage.

At my father-in-law's deathbed, my teacher and I were at his side performing the final rescue. When it had become clear that nothing more could be done, I myself pulled out the gastric tube that had been inserted in him, because it was causing the old man too much suffering. As he lay dying, my father-in-law looked at me and passed away with a smile. He was the most unperturbed person about death I have ever known. He had trusted me all his life; when my own marriage ran into obstacles, it was he who, out of his own esteem for me, had single-handedly made it happen. I have always been grateful to him.

Four years have passed, and I have never had the courage to recall my mother's final moments, nor those of my father-in-law. Before 2012 I had been rather proud of my medical skill, for in those years I had indeed achieved near-legendary, life-restoring results. Before that I had also been quite confident in my business ability. But after 2012, my self-confidence was shattered in an instant.

For four years I have traveled to famous mountains everywhere, seeking out monks and Daoists in all directions. I came to love the life of the flickering lamp before an ancient Buddha, of the evening drum and the morning bell; I could no longer summon any interest in worldly life, and even my sexual desire faded. I have lived like an ascetic, blaming and punishing myself. My face has not changed, but my heart has grown old. My spirits have sunk low, and the only thing that still holds my interest is medicine; whenever a patient calls for help, I rush to the rescue regardless of the consequences.

On May 1, four years on, my elder brother went back to pay respects to our mother, quarreled with our father, stormed out of the house, and crossed dozens of li of mountain road on foot through the night to reach the county town; his phone had run out of power. I spent the whole sleepless night in terror, afraid that anything might befall my only sibling on the road. My father was stricken with remorse and wept. Since my mother's death, not one of the three men closest to her in life has escaped being plunged into extreme suffering.

For four years the hardships my wife and child have endured because of me are beyond description; there was even a time when I considered shaving my head and becoming a monk. After every patient died, when the patient's sons and daughters asked me, "Teacher, how did you yourself eventually recover from the grief of losing your mother?" I would tell them that it was time that brought me through. Occasionally I look back at what I wrote in the period just before my mother's death and after, and I can scarcely bear to read it. Yet the truth is that four years have not fully taken away this pain. Even now, when I think of the suffering my mother endured from illness, and of her leaving this world so prematurely, my heart aches. My loving mother, who spent her whole life in compassion and through so much hardship, was by nature optimistic and always happy!

For four years I have deliberately avoided looking at the photographs and videos my mother left behind, because every time I look, I weep. Every time I board the train home to honor her memory, thinking of the journeys my mother once took with us between Beijing and our hometown, my heart is overcome with sorrow. In Beijing, for a long time I dared not walk the roads my mother once walked; whenever I passed those roads and recalled how, while she was alive, I took her hand and strolled beneath the trees, listening as she poured out her suffering to me, I was overwhelmed with grief.

I had sought out famous doctors in Beijing and abroad for my mother's illness, but none could do anything to ease the pain caused by her cerebral-apoplexy sequelae and her cancer. Left with no other choice, I set aside the company I had founded and studied medicine day and night, sleeping only three hours a day, doing everything I could think of to relieve my mother's suffering.

At that time I was deeply struck by a single sentence from the Japanese Kampo physician Dōsaku Tōmoto. Dr. Tōmoto was a Western-medicine doctor whose daughter died of intestinal typhus despite rescue efforts; he left these words behind: "I resent that medicine has no art, and grieve that early death cannot be saved." From then on, Dr. Tōmoto abandoned Western medicine, lived in poverty and drift for nearly twenty years while studying Chinese medicine with fierce dedication, and at last became a towering master of Japanese Kampo medicine, with outstanding clinical results. His work Kōkan Igaku (Imperial Chinese Medicine) also became the crowning achievement of the Japanese Chinese-medicine world; to this day it remains a highly regarded work among Chinese-medicine circles worldwide, and many readers have benefited greatly from it—among them our country's renowned master of classical formulas, Professor Hu Xishu. I myself love this book deeply; reading it repeatedly and dwelling on it carefully has raised my clinical results considerably.

The trajectory of my life was thus altered by fate. Along the way I struggled several times; I once thought of returning to the business world to improve my family's life. But drawn by medicine, and steeped as I was in Chinese classical philosophy and Buddhism, I could no longer rekindle my passion for commerce. Gradually my heart grew still as water, free of material desire, intent only on advancing in medicine and saving more patients like my mother.

The direct effect of my renunciation of worldly life over these four years has been a sharp drop in income and a decline in my family's standard of living. Happily, everyone has at last adapted to my change. Today I only hope to continue forward in medicine, to rescue the dying and heal the wounded, and in my spare time to write, to give some vent to what fills my heart.

Ever since my mother fell ill, my life's wish has been to become a good doctor and to help patients like my mother. When I took the national college entrance exam in 1998, every single first choice I listed was a medical university. Unfortunately I did poorly in the exam, missed my first choice, and was assigned to mechanical engineering. Because my score was high, I was assigned to a key major at a prestigious university. Though I wanted to repeat a year and retake the exam for medical school, my destitute family could not afford it. I feel the absurdity of China's education system in my era reached its peak in this very thing: education never valued a person's own life aspirations. Once enrolled, I refused to attend classes, borrowed medical books from the library to study on my own, and drew criticism from my teachers. Finally, for various reasons, I dropped out and went to the National Library to study on my own, still chiefly pursuing medicine.

Life is like a parabola: launched from the origin, it traces half an ellipse and then returns to the origin. Had my mother not first suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and then cancer, I think I too might have imagined I had forgotten my original ideal, absorbed in business, earning a living for my family. But fate played such a cruel joke on me—a joke that brought me back to my long-ago dream. My life is a life that, after bitter pain, chose again through sorrowful tears.

Today marks the fourth anniversary of my loving mother's passing. A son longs to care for his parent, but the parent is no longer there; I can never again fulfill my filial duty to her. Yet, as the great Lin Juemin wrote, "Respect the aged of my own family, and extend that respect to the aged of others; cherish the young of my own family, and extend that care to the young of others." To save other patients who, like my mother, have suffered torments has become my life's calling. I hope not only to practice medicine lawfully and formally, but also to have the ability to open a clinic or hospital, and in this age of rampant materialism, to realize my life's wish of returning medicine entirely to its humanitarian mission of saving lives.

I have gradually awakened from my grief. These past years of a heart as dead as ashes have let me see through the fame, wealth, and position of the mortal world, and I have returned to being an idealist. As both a physician and a son—with a parent dying in one's own arms—the anguish of bitterly blaming one's own inadequate skill is something no one who has not lived through it can understand. Over these years I have tempered my medical skill and my character, and I am still not satisfied with myself. But I understand that as long as I keep striving and keep walking this road, one day I will become an outstanding physician, able to save many lives and bring help and comfort to their families.

My mother—a woman whose whole life was steeped in compassion—would surely have wanted me to pursue this very work. The road to my goal is still long, but however hard it may be, I will walk it, all the way to the end.