Like Wind Passing By, Like Flowers Opening and Falling

After the Start of Autumn, the eggplants, loofahs, and cowpeas in my vegetable garden clearly stopped growing much, truly fulfilling the old saying: "A person lives a lifetime; plants live an autumn." Living in the concrete jungle of the city, we have grown numb to this natural unfolding of life; few people still feel the sorrow of spring passing or autumn arriving. But in farming, autumn is autumn. In the four-season North, once autumn comes, all things begin to wither. This stern, life-withering season also reminds us that human life is finite.

If a person's life were divided into four seasons, I have now entered early autumn. After several autumn winds have blown and several autumn rains have fallen, many things within my heart will no longer grow. The restlessness of youth, for example, has gradually left me. People of our age no longer secrete hormones as vigorously as in our twenties, and no longer need to desperately show off to win the favor of the opposite sex.

We are ordinary beings among the multitudes, following the natural laws that must be followed from birth to death. Our lives are like the wind: once passed, they leave no trace; like flowers: after blooming, they wither and fall to the earth, becoming mud. Birth, aging, illness, and death are natural events. No matter how reluctant we are, our loved ones—and we ourselves—all have the moment to step off the stage of life.

If death is inevitable, I hope death can be as beautiful as life. Mr. Wen Yiduo was a native of Huanggang, Hubei. After his young daughter died of illness, he wrote a funeral song titled "Perhaps":

Perhaps you are truly too tired from weeping,

Perhaps, perhaps you want to take a nap—

Then tell the nightingale not to cough,

frogs not to croak, and bats not to fly.

Do not let sunlight pry open your eyelids,

do not let the clear breeze brush your brows;

no one may wake you,

I will hold up an umbrella of pine shade to shelter your sleep.

Perhaps you hear the earthworms turning the soil,

hear the roots of the little grass drinking water;

perhaps you find this kind of music

more beautiful than the curses of human voices.

So then, close your eyelids tight,

I will let you sleep, I will let you sleep—

I will gently cover you with the yellow earth,

I will tell the paper money to drift slowly away.

Wen Yiduo, the upright man of letters who could slap the table and stand up to corrupt rulers, who faced death unflinchingly, had not only an iron spine but also a deeply tender side. His poem "Perhaps," while moving people to tears, has also comforted many hearts. It brings Tagore's line—"Let life be beautiful like summer flowers, and death like autumn leaves"—to vivid fulfillment.

I do not like the cold, rigid death of modern medical care—the dying person, tubes all over the body, patients or merely the aged approaching death in pain, struggling step by step toward death. Such death prolongs the dying struggle and leaves the family with endless grief and painful memories.

I hope that on the day I die, I can peacefully say goodbye to my loved ones and let them know that I have no fear of death, and that I hope they will not grieve because of it.

If, before my death, the loved ones caring for me could wheel me outside in a wheelchair and let me quietly take a last look at the world in front of pleasing natural scenery, then I would have no further regrets. After death, let this stinking skin-bag be handed over to the medical institutions that need it.

There is a beauty in flowers blooming, and there should also be a beauty in them falling. Birth is surely joyful; death is not sorrowful. Coming to this world for a single journey is exactly like the wind passing by, and like flowers opening and falling. One who can regard life and death as the same may be said to understand the Way of heaven and earth.