In Mourning of My Father-in-Law (Written May 9, 2014)

Parted in life at Qingming, parted by death at Guyu

At 11:40 a.m. on April 23, 2014, my father-in-law, after suffering his third stroke, passed away despite emergency rescue efforts.

When my father-in-law breathed his last, my wife's younger brother and I were at his bedside, staying with him until the final moment. As I was using liquor to wipe his body in an attempt to bring down the high fever caused by his lung infection, he calmly stopped breathing; at the very end his face was relaxed, and he left with a faint smile. This was the second time within two years that I had seen a close relative off with my own eyes.

When my father-in-law died, my wife and her brothers and sisters, along with her brother-in-law, were hurrying home from thousands of miles away. In the last few hours, seeing that recovery was already beyond help, I personally removed the gastric tube and oxygen mask that were causing him such intense suffering. The curtain of life was already unavoidable; there was really no need to let the old man endure any more pain.

The day my father-in-law fell ill happened to be Guyu, one of the twenty-four solar terms; four days later he died. The solar term before Guyu is Qingming. At Qingming I had just rushed back to my hometown to sweep my mother's grave. At that time my father-in-law was still robust; he had ridden his motorcycle to the reservoir to go fishing, and was very glad to see me back. He stuffed my travel bag full of local specialties and filled a flask with freshly pressed peanut oil, insisting that I take it all back to Beijing. When I left home for the station, he drove his electric scooter to see me off. I never imagined that this would be the last time I saw him. Half a month later, at Guyu, he suffered his third stroke, and the most severe cerebrovascular incident of his life. When I rushed home, he lay in the hospital unconscious.

With my father-in-law in critical condition, the whole family was thrown into panic. He was admitted to the neurology department of the county People's Hospital. My senior schoolmate works in that department; my mother had been rescued there by my senior and his colleagues during her first stroke. My father's elder brother's wife had also been saved by my senior when she had a stroke. Out of trust in him, I felt reassured about my father-in-law's treatment under his care.

My senior, now a backbone attending neurologist, told me that although the risks were indeed high, there was still hope of pulling my father-in-law through. This greatly set my mind at ease; going home, I was no longer frantic. After all, I myself deal with critically ill patients every moment, so in emergencies I can easily stay calm. My return steadied the emotions of the entire family; everyone believed that my father-in-law could be rescued.

On the morning of the third day of treatment, the paralyzed right side of his body began to move, and his left hand could turn the pages of a book one by one. This filled me with relief. The sudden deterioration came at noon that same day, when he was scheduled for an MRI. The procedure was clearly far too long—it lasted about an hour and a half. I clearly remember we wheeled him into the MRI room around 10:40 a.m. and did not come out until after 12 noon; the operator had left his post for a long while. This irresponsible act directly led to the worsening of his condition. After spending over an hour in the oxygen-depleted MRI room, from about 1 p.m. that day he developed a high fever and paralysis of all four limbs, and a fatal lung infection set in.

Because of his long-term heavy smoking and the widespread abuse of antibiotics in China, once the lung infection set in, every method tried failed to reverse the decline. His fever would not subside, thick phlegm accumulated in his lungs, and within a few hours his condition became critical: arrhythmia, with a heart rate reaching 270–280. The imaging report showed infarction of nearly the entire left cerebrum, brainstem involvement, severe midline shift, and the severity of the cerebral infarction and hemorrhage had reached a fatal level.

All rescue efforts in the hospital proved futile; his temperature stayed high and his breathing grew ever more labored. At midnight, he began to show dyspnea and heart failure; his pupils were already dilated and unreactive to light, and his face and lips had turned cyanotic. The attending physician, who knew me well, took me aside and told me that the old man could not be saved. He advised us to prepare to take him home; according to local tradition, an elder is said to have a good death only when he breathes his last in his own home.

Because not all the family had yet arrived, the doctors asked whether we would consider a tracheotomy and craniotomy to prolong his life a little longer, so that my wife and her siblings, still on their way home, could see him one last time. I refused. Though heartbroken, I knew that at this point such traumatic rescue no longer served the purpose of saving a life. From a humanitarian standpoint, I should not add more suffering to my father-in-law merely out of custom, so I decided to give up. I even refused the nurse's final suctioning attempt, because the previous suctioning sessions had caused him agony; though unconscious, he had still summoned his last strength to struggle.

After 2 a.m., he could only maintain vital signs by deep abdominal breathing. I called for an ambulance-equipped vehicle to transport him back to the old family home in the countryside, where we urgently prepared for the funeral. By the time we arrived, his abdominal breathing grew ever deeper and his phlegm increased. I recalled that after my mother developed this kind of deep abdominal breathing, she lasted less than an hour. I had my wife's younger brother, who was at my side, burn spirit money for my father-in-law according to custom, while I brought dried aged mugwort from the old home and rolled it into moxa sticks to perform emergency moxibustion. After indirect moxibustion at Shenque (CV8), Yunmen (LU2), Zusanli (ST36) and several other acupoints for about three hours, his breathing gradually became more even; the abdominal breathing was no longer as deep as it had been in the hospital, the phlegm in his throat clearly decreased, his eyelids kept trying to flutter, and when I fed him fresh bamboo sap (Tianzhuli), he could begin to swallow with difficulty once or twice on his own; his limbs reacted when the moxa burned him. But his pupils remained dilated and unreactive to light.

By daybreak, he had clearly improved. The family's hopes were rekindled, but his high fever still would not break, so we called a local doctor to start an IV, applying standard Western rescue protocol: first mannitol to lower intracranial pressure, then antibiotics for the pulmonary inflammation. Taking Chinese herbs was already hopeless, because he could not swallow medicine at all; even if one or two sips were forced, they would drool back out.

By noon on the 23rd, because of the prolonged high fever, his breathing again grew more and more difficult; moxibustion no longer helped. My own TCM master specially came from the TCM hospital to give him acupuncture, hoping it might help the lung infection. While the master was needling him, I saw that bruises from coagulated blood had appeared on his legs, and I knew it was already beyond help. Not long after the master left, as I was wiping his body, his breathing suddenly stopped. Amid the family's heartrending wailing, I performed the final rescue—cardiopulmonary compressions to try to restart his heart—but to no avail.

After holding on for dozens of hours, my mind went blank. My father-in-law was gone, so suddenly. Remorse, self-reproach, grief and sorrow mingled together; I held the legs of this old man whom I had called "Father" for ten years and wept uncontrollably. He was one of the elders in the world who most admired, cared for, and trusted me. Losing a close relative once again pierced me to the bone.

Parted in life at Qingming, parted by death at Guyu. Such a sudden blow of life leaves one utterly unprepared. The son longs to care for his parents, but they are no longer there; fate plays with us so cruelly, filling our lives with regret through this enormous upheaval.

Twenty years of mutual understanding; entrusting me with his final affairs

More than half a month has passed since my father-in-law's death, and I still cannot believe he is gone. His voice, expression and smile remain vivid in my mind. Two years ago, when he was hospitalized for his second stroke, I happened to be at home handling my mother's funeral. When I went to the hospital to look after him, he entrusted his final arrangements to me by the bedside. At that time his illness was not severe, but after two strokes he had a premonition that he might die suddenly one day. I chided him then for speaking of such inauspicious things, but who would have thought that today it would truly become a permanent farewell? Each time I recall his solemn trust, I can barely hold back my tears.

I still remember when my own mother suffered her first cerebral hemorrhage; upon learning of it, my father-in-law called to comfort me. Not good with words, after a word or two of consolation he simply told me: spare no effort to save your mother; whatever money is needed, I will wire it to you; if it is not enough, I will borrow from your third uncle on your behalf. That call was a great comfort. In the end I did not use his money, but he gave me enormous moral support, allowing me to rescue my mother without a financial second thought. My mother was finally rescued after about twenty days in critical condition.

From when I first met my wife to now, more than twenty years have flown by. When we first met, the youngest of her brothers was only three or four years old; now, the youngest of my nephews is already three or four. I no longer remember when I first met my father-in-law. My mother-in-law was a girl from my own village; by clan generation she and my grandfather were of the same rank, so before I married my wife I addressed my father-in-law as "Gu Die" (husband of my grandfather's sister).

Though I was the son-in-law, I was no stranger to him before the wedding; even before dating my wife I was already a frequent visitor to their home. From a teenage boy to now, at thirty-five, he watched me grow up along the way and trusted and admired me deeply. Beginning with my wife's failure on the college entrance exam and her decision to retake it, I was drawn into major family decisions; the schooling of her two younger sisters was also on my advice. In the most recent decade or so, whenever he could not resolve a major matter, he would invariably let me decide on his behalf. On some household matters, when our views differed, I even clashed with him, yet he never took it as insubordination. If afterward my judgment proved more farsighted, he would even tell me he regretted not having listened to me. When he failed to stop smoking after his first stroke, I even lost my temper at him, and he would look as embarrassed as a child who had done wrong. In recent years he had come, more or less, to depend on me; without me to stand with him on major family events, he truly could not manage alone.

Chinese people often say: a gentleman dies for one who knows him. That my father-in-law trusted me so deeply moved me greatly. What I regret most is not having returned home for the Spring Festival this year, and when I did go back at Qingming, it was so rushed that, after confirming the elders were well, I hurried away. This Spring Festival I had been genuinely daunted by the complicated interpersonal disputes back home; spending the holiday in Beijing was, truth be told, partly an escape from the unpleasantness at home. As children, when our parents are alive we fail to step forward and share their burdens; then one day we wish we could share them again, and there is no chance. For this I feel deep remorse and self-reproach.

If I had gone home that Spring Festival and helped him settle the family disputes, perhaps things would not have deteriorated to the point where he was uneasy day and night. I could also have arranged a thorough physical check-up for him during the holiday, detected the abnormal signs in his body, and taken precautions; perhaps this stroke would never have happened.

When my mother died, I was overcome with grief to the point of fainting. My father-in-law, who had come to escort her funeral, pulled me up from where I lay weeping on the ground and urged me to restrain my sorrow. In his eyes, I, his son-in-law, was a man of deep feeling and passion—someone whose cleverness and clumsiness alike had a character of their own. Years ago, he always believed I was different from the crowd and would one day achieve something great. When our marriage nearly fell through, he alone stood by me, even though at the time I had offended him by speaking too bluntly. I am grateful to him for recognizing my character and ability.

His lifelong principle was: "Better to lose out yourself than to let another down." This won him the loyalty of many people, and this personal charisma built his career. Had hypertension not caused his stroke, he might still today be one of the most influential building contractors in our region. He held his own children to the same standard. After the few conflicts my wife and I had became known to him, he would immediately lecture his daughter, urging her to be more reasonable. If my wife was in the wrong, he would even apologize to me on her behalf.

Because he was so open and upright, all these years I treated him not as a father-in-law but as my own father. When he erred, I would correct him without regard for appearances; when he met with hardship, I would face it with him undaunted. Perhaps because of this, among all his children he knew and trusted me best. Beyond the bond of father-in-law and son-in-law, there was between us a bond of kindred spirits.

For this reason, during his critical illness and after his death, I forced myself through decisions that were bound to provoke resentment and even recriminations. Had I not done so, in the chaos of mourning there would have been no one to anchor the family. Even though my own father repeatedly stopped me from meddling in my father-in-law's affairs and grew angry that I would not listen, I pressed on. My father, weathered by life's storms, believed this would surely bring me endless future trouble and exhaustion. I was not unaware of the consequences, but my father-in-law had entrusted his final affairs to me; he must have known that, when he was gone, I alone would be willing to bear this bewildering aftermath without complaint. Precisely because of the deep bond of twenty years, he treated me as an eldest son rather than an eldest son-in-law. And all I can return for his trust is "not to let him down" and "to do my utmost."

His life was a life of hardship. From the moment he was born, it was fated that he would bear a heavy load. As the eldest son, facing a family in utter poverty, he bore the duty and responsibility of providing for his relatives. In years when there was not enough to eat, he would have stolen just to keep his family alive. After the Reform and Opening-up, he seized the moment to go into business and built a career. But raising five children was such a huge burden that even when he prospered he never felt at ease.

In the same year my mother had her stroke, I took both my father-in-law and mother-in-law for a full check-up, and found his systolic blood pressure to be 220. My senior, who has worked in neurology for over ten years, told me it was the highest blood pressure he had ever seen. That number reflected the lifelong weight his shoulders had borne. After his death, from the recollections of my uncles and aunts, I learned that his childhood had been bitter and high-pressured. Having brushed against death several times, his sense of crisis was far stronger than most. Perhaps the reason my father-in-law and I found so much resonance is that, in this regard, we are cut from the same cloth.

He was generous to others but extremely frugal with himself. Though he became for a time the most capable building contractor in the area, in life he saved every penny. The pressures and humiliations he endured while making a living are too many to tell. I still remember, not long after my wife and I married, a hooligan from the neighboring village came to cause him trouble over a construction dispute. His village was small and weak, and not knowing how to respond, he asked me what to do. I advised him to seek harmony; together we went to the village entrance, gave the thug good cigarettes and said every conciliatory word, hoping to be left in peace. Back home, my mother-in-law seethed with indignation—we both came from the largest clan in the county; if such a thing had happened in our village, we would never have compromised like this. But to make a living, he had to swallow his anger.

He was a straightforward man, casual with himself, and in recent years had grown indifferent to life and death. During his hospitalization, although his speech center was damaged by the stroke so he could not speak, he repeatedly reached for the tubes to pull them out—his will to abandon treatment was unmistakable. He likely did not want to become a burden on the family. These days my wife often grieves, and when I comfort her I say: if Father knows anything in the afterlife, given his character he would likely tell his children with a shrug, "Weep a little and let it pass; it's no great matter." That is his true attitude toward life and death.

His life feared neither hardship nor pain. Once he grew a sarcoma on his hand; to save money he did not go to the hospital, smashed a glass bottle, disinfected it briefly, and cut the growth off himself with a shard of glass. What courage that took! It was precisely this bold spirit that made his life so vivid and never wasted.

Though his daughters grieve that he never got to enjoy life, from a man's standpoint I think he lived a life without regrets. He savored the joy of striving and fighting, and the pleasure of giving and contributing; that is enough. This is how society defines a man.

When the funeral master of ceremonies was about to write the elegiac address, I once suggested that perhaps I ought to write it myself. This displeased him, so I dropped the matter. His life was extraordinary: a hero for half a lifetime. The joys and sorrows in his heart—how could an outsider possibly know? Now I can only turn long song into weeping, and offer this eulogy in his memory.

Blessing or curse? Cause or effect?

Bodhisattvas fear causes; ordinary beings fear effects. According to Buddhism, one who has cultivated to the bodhisattva level understands the causal links between all things; seeing the effect in the cause, he cuts it off at the source, leaving no future trouble. Ordinary beings, by contrast, wait until the effect has appeared before grasping causation. Hence bodhisattvas fear causes, while ordinary beings fear retribution. The ancient Chinese sages put it another way: the fool is blind to what has already happened; the wise see what has not yet sprouted.

Whether a person is a bodhisattva or an ordinary being, a sage or a fool, is hard to say. Only after walking many roads does one learn how to find the right direction and gauge the measure of things. A great deal of fate is beyond our own control. Hence Laozi says blessing and curse lean upon each other; in misfortune there is no need to grieve, in blessing no need to rejoice.

Having lived through the deaths of my mother and my father-in-law, my understanding of life has become three-dimensional. Birth, aging, illness and death are inevitable; joy and sorrow, parting and reunion, are constant. Triumph and defeat alternate; turn the angle of vision and they trade places—triumph is defeat, defeat is triumph. The relationships among life's circumstances are exceedingly complex; the mediocre observe the surface, the wise trace the inner cause.

My father-in-law's life began in poverty and suffered through wealth. Every effort he made for survival and development brought him wealth, but also planted the seeds of disaster. The world we live in is not perfect; darkness and filth have always existed, and we ourselves are no exception—each of us carries both the upright and the crooked within. In building his fortune, his reputation soared; fame brought him many conveniences, but it also awakened the wicked hearts of some. Reflecting on the causes behind the bitterness and frustrations of his last decade, wealth and fame bear no small blame.

The Book of Changes says: "The superior man is diligent as the day and vigilant as the evening, as if on guard against danger; then there is no blame." This is the survival rule our ancestors distilled: in this world, one careless word or act can bring terrible consequences. A depressing truth of human society is that it is a pack of animals fighting over resources. The clever snatch, the bold plunder; the gentleman takes what is his by right; the petty stop at nothing. Therefore one must always tread as on thin ice, remain content with enough and know when to stop, and be vigilant morning and evening to live in peace.

Profit is the object pursued by countless people under heaven. Once you hold it, others will move heaven and earth to snatch it from you, stopping at nothing. The barbaric side of human nature has not changed across millennia. The trials my father-in-law endured in his last decade were rooted precisely here. No one is without weakness; no one is incorruptible. Once people lose their bottom line, there is no one they cannot harm. He fought all his life, gaining and losing; which weighed more is hard to judge. But one thing is certain: almost every road he took was forced on him by life. Fate decreed it, and he had to grit his teeth and go on.

These years have left me in pain and confusion. I have thought through life again and again, trying to untangle its threads, grasp its causes and effects, nip problems in the bud, and bring order to my days. In the end I did not achieve what I expected, for no other reason than this: we live in a worldly world, and many factors in our lives are beyond our control. The boast that we ourselves command our fate holds only under limited conditions. Despite constant effort, life does not bend to our wishes. Given this, all we can do is stop defining the good life, learn to make peace wherever we are, and live with the attitude that whatever life we have, here and now, is beautiful.

I once grieved that my mother could not hold such an attitude, and so lived in misery. My father-in-law, in truth, was no different. Worrying too much, melancholy and withdrawn, they pained themselves and grieved those who loved them. Twenty years ago, he believed that once his children were grown he could finally relax. Twenty years on, the children were grown, and he found that life after raising them was no easier than before—indeed, there were more troubles.

What is joy in life? What is pain in death?

Sorting through his effects, I found the medicine I had bought for him at Qingming; not a single pill had been touched. His relatives and friends, and even my own father, told me that his last days had been a hardship. The sixty-one-year-old would sometimes bury his head in his hands and weep over sorrowful family affairs. These accounts left me unable to hold back tears. That an elder should live such a hard life is partly the fault of the times, but the children cannot escape blame. Even if what grieved him was not of our doing, we are still guilty of not having cared enough.

Ever since his hypertension was discovered, I had repeatedly asked my senior—an excellent physician—to safeguard his health, and whenever I went home I would visit him with gifts. My senior always treated him conscientiously; though he had had two prior strokes, both were mild and uneventful. My senior told me that up to the end of last year he still came often, but from this year on he stopped coming for prescriptions.

Before I returned home at Qingming, he had specifically asked the family not to tell me about his condition, so that I would not worry or make a fuss on his account. When I arrived, he and my mother-in-law told me he had just had a brain CT with the chief of internal medicine No. 2 at the county People's Hospital, and everything was normal. He said he had had a little ailment, but under the local doctor's care it had been resolved. Seeing him as usual, robust, I also let my guard down. To keep me from worrying away from home, my in-laws had hidden a great deal from me. Such is a parent's heart: however hard their own life, they do not want their children to fret or toil.

His stroke had precursors. He had felt unwell several times before; after getting some vascular-unblocking IV drips from a grassroots doctor to relieve symptoms, he stopped treatment. His depression had already become severe, but no one was willing to tell us the truth. Only after his death did his close friends tell us that in his final days he had been deeply depressed and often weary of life.

I am ashamed that, having studied medicine for so long, I could not help him prevent this stroke. What pains me even more is that I could not share his burdens. His sudden death made me realize, all at once, how little I have given to my family. Fame and profit have no end, but a parent's lifespan is finite; if you wish to repay their upbringing, you must do it early.

His life these years had been hard. Though not financially strapped, he was spiritually tormented. Last year, the death of his own mother—then in her eighties—also weighed on him. He lived without ease. On top of that, he was in that anxious phase men go through when stepping back from front-line work, and the sense of loss had not yet settled. Watching the family fortunes decline while he could do nothing, depression was inevitable.

I used to think that inner hurdles could be crossed by self-adjustment, but his ordeal taught me that this is wrong. Not everyone has a strong heart. Strong-willed older men, in particular, when they meet hardship, lack the experience and strategies to cope and need their family's help. We have grown used to our fathers' strength and have not yet realized that they have, in fact, become the vulnerable ones; the care we give them is far from enough.

Why not return? Both parents are old

After my mother died, I often thought: in ten years, when my son is grown, I will return to my hometown to care for my father and my parents-in-law, sweeping my dear mother's grave morning and evening, fulfilling a child's duty of old-age care and burial. Unexpectedly, in less than two years, my father-in-law died suddenly.

After the funeral, when I went home to sweep my mother's grave, I visited my eldest uncle. Grieving for my father-in-law, he could not let go of my aunt, who had also died of a stroke a year earlier. He said that although he had two sons, since his wife's death he was no different from a lonely old man. In this age, the young have all gone away to work; only the old and children remain in the villages. The hollow-nest phenomenon among rural elderly is already severe. The old, rooted to their native soil, cannot adapt to city life for various reasons and refuse to leave home to make a living elsewhere with us.

Equally disappointing is the grassroots medical care. In a first-tier city like Beijing or Shanghai, my father-in-law would not have died so young. The routine preventive care and emergency rescue conditions are far superior to those at home. Even at home, if his children had been at his side, such an accident probably would not have happened.

Both my mother and my father-in-law are gone. The dead cannot be admonished, but the living can still be pursued. My mother-in-law and my father are still alive, and they too are old now. My wish to return home has grown even more urgent. Our two, perhaps three, generations have paid a terrible price for China's development. Since ancient times, Chinese people have valued family. But since the Reform and Opening-up, Chinese society has changed beyond recognition, and Chinese families have been shattered as a result. Left-behind children and left-behind elderly have become acute social problems. The young want to return home, only to find the way blocked at every turn; the entire social structure has undergone an irreversible change.

We ran to the cities chasing our dreams. Did we catch them? More than ninety percent did not. And the few who did—what then? Has happiness in life truly increased? I am afraid not.

More than twenty years ago, we burned the midnight oil and fought tooth and nail just to escape our hometown. Today, to go back and care for our parents, we again have to strain every sinew. We come to the cities to safeguard the lives and health of other people's parents, while neglecting how uninsured our own parents' lives and health have become in the withering countryside.

Having seen firsthand how our hometown's backward medical resources could not save my own loved ones, I suddenly felt a strong desire to go back to the grassroots and build a health service. My fellow villagers have the same natural rights as city dwellers, but it is plain that the rights they now enjoy cannot be compared with those of city people. Why not go home to build our own hometown and care for our own parents?

The world is not perfect. After a few years of dragging myself through despondency, I woke up and thought: since I am dissatisfied with this world, I should strive to change it, with my own strength and in my own way.

As a child I always wanted to grow up fast and leave home; only after I had truly left did I learn that family is what matters most. If family cannot be cared for while development is relentlessly stressed, that is forcibly destroying human nature. Such development is too utilitarian and holds little happiness. I often ask myself: even if one day I were rolling in wealth and world-famous, my mother and my father-in-law would still be gone to illness, never having lived out their years; what achievement or happiness would there be in that?

We owe our parents far too much!