Seven Years of Forging the Heart: I Have Finally Come to Terms with It

In the small hours of May 3, 2012, my mother departed this world. On April 5, 2019, Qingming Festival, I returned to my hometown to sweep my mother's grave.

Seven years have passed. I, who cheekily call myself a disciple of Zhuangzi, have finally let go of the matter of my mother's death.

The rapeseed flowers in my hometown were in full bloom. Spring had come, and all things were growing freely and wildly.

My mother's grave lies right on our family's private plot. In the warm spring season, flowers ring her grave and a hundred birds contend in song. Buried in this blessed place, Mother has no further regret.

Heaven and earth are, after all, far broader than a tiny room. Leaving my study and going home to tend the grave, my heart suddenly felt much more open. In such natural surroundings, mind and spirit are refreshed; I could once again approach Qingming grave-sweeping with the carefree feeling I had as a child on an outing in spring.

Thinking of my mother, I was no longer sorrowful and tearful. Rather, seeing the endlessly enchanting spring colors of my hometown, my desire to retire to my native place and practice medicine to help others grew all the stronger.

Only, the villagers have gradually left the countryside. In another ten years, if I really come back, who knows how many people will still remain in the villages. Speaking of practicing medicine to help others, I fear by then there may be no one left for me to help.

The village is empty, coming alive only at festivals. The bustling village of deep memory no longer exists.

The Medicine King Temple I loved to visit most is also desolate and quiet. Standing on the mountainside of the Medicine King Temple, looking down over distant hills and near waters, crisscrossing fields and picturesque scenery, I found few human beings.

I am highly adaptable. If I could really return to my hometown, within half a year I would readapt and grow to love this new way of life.

But to actually return to my hometown may still take me ten years.

My son is not yet grown. Because of the outflow of rural population, the junior high school back home has been abandoned; the school has now become a pigsty.

I can hardly have my son, who is in junior high, stop studying and come home to be a swineherd.

Right after my mother died, an elder of mine said to me: "Zhiyuan, the living look after the living, the dead look after the dead. Your mother is gone and cannot return; dead is done, an end to all. You did your utmost to treat her for all these years; now go and build your own life."

Such are country people—open-minded, natural, and indifferent to life and death.

Even my own mother, before her death, had let go. Though she clung to life then, she no longer feared death.

My mother deeply believed that death is not the end of life. She had grown up in just such a culture; she firmly believed that after death there is another world, and that she would be reborn as a human being again.

So death in this life is merely the beginning of the next. If she wishes to be reunited with her loved ones, she need only patiently await the next life's meeting.

Before she died, my mother spoke cheerfully of her own funeral arrangements. Looking at the coffin prepared for her, she even asked her eldest sister—my maternal aunt—to judge whether her coffin was any good.

What an open-hearted state of mind! Such is the power of religious faith and custom.

I am an atheist, but I am grateful that theism helped my mother conquer her fear of death.

A few years ago I even used to criticize theism. Thinking about it now, that kind of behavior is both boring and absurd. Everyone has the freedom to choose their own way of life and belief; why should others interfere? There is no absolutely correct way of life or philosophy in this world. It is best not to fault others because of one's own beliefs.

My mother and I conquered the fear of death in different ways, but the result was the same. I do not feel that an atheist who, through his own awakening to life and death, overcomes the fear of death, is any more clever than a theist who overcomes it through faith.

Through the ages, the hardest thing has been death alone. But all things that are born must die, and no one can escape death.

For most people, death is a terrible thing. If one can become indifferent to this most fearsome thing, there is in truth little in life left to grieve or fear.

In this great nature, one might say we have never come and never gone; only the mode of existence is constantly changing. Human in this life, after death we turn to soil, nourishing other creatures and becoming part of them, in an endless cycle that has been so from time immemorial.

If that is so, what is there to grieve?