Life Is Short; the Days Ahead Are Numbered
My son spent a month on vacation in my hometown; as the new school term approached, I went back to fetch him to return to school in Beijing and stayed a few days there myself. The second day after I arrived, the father of one of my childhood friends passed away; the day I left home happened to be the day of his funeral procession. My father is now a gong-and-drum player in the village's amateur folk band: whenever an elder dies, he is invited to beat the gongs and drums at the funeral. Each year he attends more than a dozen funerals, playing funeral music mostly for people of his own age.
When my father's contemporaries gather to chat, they jokingly speculate which of these old fellows will be the next to meet Yama. Rural elderly people possess an extraordinary equanimity about life and death. What joy is there in being born? What suffering in dying? To them, death holds nothing frightening. One of the greatest blessings of living in a tightly clustered clan village is that you get more than ten direct lessons in death every year—under our village funeral custom, when someone dies, sixteen men carry the coffin around the village, and the whole village, young and old, sees the procession off as if visiting a farewell. Once you have encountered death often enough, it loses its terror; no profound wisdom is needed to take it in stride.
That week back home, I was cut off from the internet, from all kinds of social news, and from commerce. Accompanying the elderly and the children, the days moved at a very slow pace. The rural air was wonderful; apart from houses and concrete roads, there was nothing but endless green fields. In high summer everything grew lush and flourishing.
On my first day back in Beijing I was met by wall-to-wall news of the Tianjin explosions: dozens of vivid lives gone in an instant, dozens of families plunged into the abyss of grief. Such sudden death is utterly different from the natural death of the rural elderly. Many of the deceased were the economic and emotional pillars of their families; their death struck those families an enormous blow. Life is fragile, fortune unkind, and suffering may visit any of us at any time.
Impermanence is so swift; life and death are but an instant apart. I, too, have already passed thirty-six winters and summers. Over these years I have grown used to partings, seen both natural and unnatural deaths, so death has become less and less frightening to me. Death is inevitable. If I live another thirty-six years, I will be close to natural death from old age; if misfortune strikes with an accident, I will forfeit natural death. The days ahead are already few; I must cherish them and not let them slip away in vain.