Live as Splendidly as the Flowers Blooming in Spring

Sister Ruoyu, who lived with me for many years and had breast cancer, has passed away. For fourteen years of fighting cancer she had always been optimistic and full of goodwill toward the world. Shortly before the Spring Festival, when we chatted, she told me not to grieve after she was gone, and that in her next life she would again be my sister.

Before I received the sad news of her death, I had already sensed that she might no longer be in this world; for if she were still alive she would not have gone so long without contacting me.

So the moment I learned she was gone, my feelings were extraordinarily calm. I was walking in a seaside park in Weihai when the news reached me. Sitting on a stone by the sea in Weihai, gazing at the water, I seemed to see her smiling across from me, talking to me, just as she did every time she came to visit me in life.

By this same sea I recalled the famous lines of the poet Haizi: 'Facing the sea, with spring blossoms.' I had come to Weihai in spring, when flowers were blooming everywhere and the blue sea stretched to the horizon, with an occasional seagull wheeling overhead. The world Sister Ruoyu has gone to may be just like this seaside in spring warmth: gentle breezes, broad horizons, and blooming flowers.

She will smile serenely, looking at all this, looking at her family, looking at me.

I was the doctor who treated her; she was the patient I treated. I was also her younger brother; she was also my elder sister. Though we were strangers before she came to me for treatment, after we met we became as family. We huddled together to fight cancer, weathering every hard moment. Together we saw off many fellow patients, and lived through one parting after another. Together, amid this flux of life and death, we came to fathom life, see through life and death, and let go of attachment.

Cancer patients are people who live facing death. I set out on the road of cancer-fighting because my mother had stomach cancer; from accompanying my own mother as she lived facing death, I went on to accompany more cancer patients in the same way, abandoning business for medicine and chasing thread by thread the hope of survival. The tenacious will to survive, born of human instinct, sustains us forward; and the goodwill that is equally human instinct lets us sustain one another through hard times.

Among the cancer patients I have known are people of every identity and station. Once cancer comes, they all become the same kind of person: cancer-fighters living facing death. Life may be cut short at any moment; we cannot take a single blade of grass or tree of this world with us. For this group, fame, wealth, status and reputation no longer matter; what matters is the length and quality of life.

Death is a question we think of from time to time. To healthy people death seems far away, but for the cancer community death may be right before their eyes. Facing death, there may at first be fear, but this fear fades day by day as time passes; though one still clings to the world, one must face death directly, for fear is of no avail.

Because life has grown short from the moment of illness, most who live facing death will no longer waste their limited hours, nor consent to live hypocritically and with effort. To live is to live brilliantly, to live as splendidly as the flowers blooming in spring—for this life will not come again.

And after walking the cancer road for so many years, I too have at last let go of emotional attachment, accepting and flowing with the natural order, so that at life-and-death partings I remain unruffled. To me, life has become this: for those who need me, to stand my final post in life and, to the greatest extent possible, help them guard their lives.