Twelve Years Apart, a Hundred Flowers Bloom on the Ridge
Midlife is a journey from pain to meaning.
— James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life
Before the Qingming Festival in 2012, I returned to my hometown to care for my mother in her final days. By then she had entered the last flicker of life, her existence like an oil lamp swaying in the wind, about to go out at any moment. Overwhelmed by grief, I wrote an essay titled "Meditations on Life" to reconcile myself with the reluctance and anguish in my heart.
In the blink of an eye, twelve years have passed. I have kept growing through letting go, and kept letting go as I grew. Finally, with time's help, I have made peace with my mother's early death from illness, and with life and death and the parting from love. Now, when I think of my mother, I no longer feel that agony of wanting to die; what I feel instead is warmth. Although my mother is no longer here, a mother's love lives on in my heart, and the years cannot dilute it. My mother's unconditional love, tolerance and acceptance have healed me throughout my life; every time I suffer a major setback, I can feel her come to my side again to comfort me.
This Qingming Festival I will go back to sweep my mother's grave. The mood in which I return is no longer bitter; it is more like being away from home for a long time and coming back to visit my mother. Grief and regret have both settled. If my mother truly has awareness in the netherworld, I think this is the outcome she most wanted to see. She would not have wished her beloved son to remain sunk in the pain of losing a mother; she would have wanted me to live more happily. Moreover, I have always felt that my mother has never really left us—she lives on in the hearts of my father and of my three siblings and me.
After my mother died, we all urged my father to find another companion, but he firmly refused. He believed no one could ever replace my mother, so whether my mother was alive or gone, he would never take a second partner. In the blink of an eye, twelve years have passed and my father still lives alone. He often wipes my mother's portrait spotlessly clean, as if she had not left him but were still beside him.
In the first three years after my mother's death, my father was often overcome by memories; whenever he thought of her, tears streamed beyond his control. We were very worried about him then (and he was worried about us too; we all supported one another through those most painful days). But now he has let go and taken a detached view of life, death and parting, though his longing for my mother has never faded.
My mother's family had a special personal charm: they were so skilled at loving, and so lively and cheerful, that their partners and children, even their neighbors and friends, could never forget them. Every time I go back, the aunts next door tell me the same thing: they tell me my mother was everyone's joy-bringer; with my mother around, even their own lives had so much more fun and vitality.
Before my aunt died, she told my uncle that in the next life she would still want to be his wife. In fact, my uncle's whole life had been rather hard up, but my aunt never once despised him. The reason is that my mother's brothers and sisters inherited a deeply affectionate kind of gene: the love they give is so sincere and profound, unmixed with any impurity, and their outlook is so sunny, that the love coming from them is simply irreplaceable.
Nowadays, whenever I have the chance, I give my family death education, telling them to take a detached view of life and death. If one day I leave before they do, I hope they will not sink into grief for too long. Life is short, death is everyone's destination, and death is no great thing; it is not worth ruining the rest of their own lives over my departure. They should enjoy their lives to the full. Because I love them, I do not want them to suffer. Nor do I want them to think, after I am gone, that my life was a bitter one—which is why I always thoroughly enjoy the life I love.
To use today's internet slang, my mother was a member of the "LOHAS" lifestyle. Her demands on life were extremely low; she endured hardship and toil, ran the frugally household, and the tiniest little pleasure could make her laugh out loud. Sorrow and pain were rarely seen on her face, and even when she was occasionally unhappy, it did not last long. As a mother-in-law, in her entire life she never once quarreled with her daughter-in-law.
My mother had no immunity to humor. My brother and I loved to play pranks on her at home, and every time she was made to laugh heartily by the mischief of her two sons. With her around, the home was warm and harmonious most of the time, and the atmosphere was relaxed. In the days after she died, we family members comforted one another by saying that, given my mother's disposition, once she reached the other world she would quickly make new friends, fit right in, and be having a wonderful time; we need not feel sad over her leaving.
When a person is cheerful, it is truly a kindness to the family—at the very least the family does not worry about them, nor are they infected by the person's bad moods and kept perpetually on edge. My father's side of the family did not have such good genes; my father's brothers and sisters were not as tolerant, united or loving as my mother's. They were constantly bickering over trivialities, which was a real headache. My mother spent her whole life healing my father, and even healing my father's brothers. Because my mother was loving and tolerant, she truly treated my father's younger brothers "as an elder sister-in-law like a mother."
My brother often says I am lucky, because I inherited my mother's genes: I am an incurable optimist most of the time, with a positive mindset, good at bringing off difficult things, and—like my mother—I have an affable way with people. All of this has helped me greatly in my career and life.
In fact, heredity is not simple. Back then Mendel thought that when an organism inherited an allele, it inherited either the maternal gene or the paternal gene. But in fact, modern biological research shows that the allele inherited by offspring may be a composite of the parents' genes, so the biological traits the offspring displays are complex. Moreover, genes are constantly mutating, and without mutation there would be no evolution, so the biological traits we ourselves display (appearance, character, health, and so on) depend on many factors.
Still, in any case, our parents drew an outline for us. From the moment we became a fertilized egg, many things in our destiny were already set. Not until middle age do we have any possibility of changing our fate, because in childhood and adolescence our personality formation is determined by heredity, education and environment. But in middle age we get one chance at self-awakening, and this awakening triggers another round of personality development.
Why is this so? Because middle-aged people are the most miserable. This suffering is a kind that resists being spoken, a kind that keeps provoking self-doubt. Young people may think self-doubt is a bad thing, because they are still at an age when they feel they are terrific. But for middle-aged people, self-doubt can be a very beneficial thing. From the moment we are born, our lives are fated to contain many errors, and these errors can only become clear to us in middle age, as we encounter various sufferings. If a person in middle age still does not doubt himself, still has unshakable faith in himself, then he has missed a fine opportunity for self-growth.
Research on happiness across the globe consistently shows that middle-aged people are the least happy. Happiness follows a U-shaped curve with age, and middle age sits at the bottom of the U. Middle-aged people bear the heaviest responsibilities: they must both support and care for the elderly and raise and care for the young. If someone in the family falls ill, a shadow falls over the whole household, and the fragile may break down.
So when one reaches middle age, the question most worth thinking about is: how should I live in order to have less stress and suffering? If a middle-aged person still does not doubt himself, it means his life has been too smooth, or he is living too falsely, afraid to face his true self.
Many things in life are doomed to an inevitable outcome, and the most painful of all is love and the loss of love. Illness, death and parting will inevitably happen, and they will take away the people we love. When the people we love are worn haggard by physical or mental illness, or vanish from our world, we suffer like addicts who can no longer get their fix—love itself is much like addiction; both are compulsive behaviors. There is only a very fine difference between one middle-aged person and another; perhaps one suffers slightly less than the other, and that is all. No one is entirely free of suffering.
The ability to handle suffering determines our happiness index, and what determines that ability? For people whose minds are basically normal, the ability to handle suffering is determined by our character and our cognition. Before middle age, we mostly grow into a personality expected by family and society, growing into a standardized "social person" rather than our true selves. Only after middle age do we wake up amid the violent pain of parting from love, and suddenly realize that we also need to learn to love ourselves better. If we cannot love ourselves better, the various troubles of midlife will reduce us to a terrible mess, and life will become wretched.
Pain and life's lessons make us grow. Those who have not experienced deep and frequent enough pain of separation from love have no right to reflect deeply on life. Only those who have suffered enough and deeply enough the pain of parting from love will turn inward and ask themselves: Is my love healthy? Is it appropriate? How should I love others? And how should I love myself?
When we raise these questions deep in our hearts, we enter the most important growth of our lives, and this growth determines the quality of our life after middle age. Because after this growth, our ability to handle suffering is greatly enhanced, we sort out our views on life and death and on love and hate, and we are no longer so anxious.
Life is a cocktail: there is sorrow, there is pain, and there is joy, and we are the bartenders of our own lives. Pain is unavoidable, even the total amount of it is unavoidably large—after all, the separation, illness and death that most people loathe are things none of us can escape. But if we pour more small joys into our own glass, the overall taste of our life will be sweeter.
A somewhat wiser middle-aged person knows how to make peace with himself, knows how to let go of attachment to love in the long river of years—or rather, knows how to transform love into another form, knows how to blur the boundary between life and death, between gathering and scattering. When the people we love no longer exist in our lives, we can recall in our minds the sweetness they brought us, instead of insisting on seeing them beside us.
So, when I go to sweep my mother's grave again, there is no grief left in my heart. In the season when a hundred flowers bloom, I need no longer weep mournfully before my mother's grave; I can take this grave-visiting as an outing in the spring, as the return of a wanderer, and as a reunion with my mother in another form.