Eternal Loss

Eternal Loss Eternal Loss Eternal Loss Eternal Loss

(我要吐槽一下简书的字体没有选择，两端也不能对齐，文章在形态上毫无美感，我要给简书差评）

In the morning of July 15, 2019, around 9 o’clock, I was awakened with a start by a call from my father, who told me that grandma had passed away in the early morning and asked my sister and me to rush back to hometown. Instead of being saddened by the news, I was even a little bit annoyed at the death-informing call, which had interrupted my sleep. Because I burned the midnight oil that night with a few hours left for sleep. 

Well, there was something more than the call, that gave rise to my annoyance. What I’m about to say will definitely anger you to condemn me as a callous animal: Going back to hometown meant loads of troubles, and one of them was that I hated to see my babbling mother.

Grandma’s death was an inseparable part of natural course. She had lived more than four scores years, the great part of time a robust village farmer, before she went into eternal sleep, never to wake up again. In the past two years or three, she had been caught with some diseases mostly caused by aging, and finally got laid down on bed all day along with a few breaths left, skinny and lifeless. It might be good for her to cease breathing to put an end on the suffering.

I felt compassionate and shamed to grandma, for she had been tortured by diseases and had to face death alone without her beloved persons standing by her bed, while I didn’t try doing anything to soften her suffering. Albeit I had lived half a childhood with grandma and she had taken good care of me, we hardly had heart-to-heart communication to develop the intimate connection, so the relationship between grandma and grandson went fainter and fainter as I pursued my education in the cities far away from her. With a number of years slipping away, I had turned a bit indifferent to her because of less frequent meeting.

From what I explained above, you may see why I was not shocked or saddened by the news of my grandma’s death, but peaceful with a tiny annoyance. Urged by father to return immediately to hometown, stuff packed soon, my sister and I set out reluctantly to be on the journey of returning, during which we didn’t say anything about grandma and behaved indifferently as if grandma’s death was no big deal.

Well, things went different afterwards.

The next afternoon we were back to the rural village. I got off the car on the street and beat the familiar path flanked by old houses and new ones to grandparents’ house. Not many steps brought me into the presence of the house, where I had once lived for quite a long time. There was a pair of elegiac couplets on either side of the door, with black characters written manually on white paper. I stepped over the threshold into the house, glancing around the drawing room, to find that more elegiac couplets had been put up on the room wall and a magnified black-and-white photo of grandma’s sited upon the table opposite the door. Of course, there were two clusters of people in the drawing room, some of whom were my relatives and the rest were here to help deal with grandma’s funeral, all enveloped in a sombre atmosphere. It had seemed ages since so many people visited here last time. Grandma’s three sons and one daughter and grandchildren were all back from work to attend her funeral. Had she been alive, she, seeing a good many people back, would have been full of happiness.

I remained silent, nodding to someone familiar. Being told to burn incense sticks for grandma, I turned to walk inside grandma’s bedroom. Wholly covered in a sheet, motionlessly lying on the bed plank, was a dead body, which was exactly my grandma. I could not see her face or any part of her body, but could only see her contour, which, brought out through a sheet, seemed to indicate that there was just a dead thin trunk covered in the sheet, not a corpse. By the bed stood an electric fan, swinging its head to blow wind over the sheet. Holding the burned incense sticks, I dropped to my knees and bowed to grandma several times, then kept still, groping in my deep memory for some scenes of grandma. All of a sudden, my heart convulsively ached. Emotion was on the brink of breaking down, accompanied by tears which were trying to crack its way out. But I did not give way to emotion and tears, and then stood up, stuck the burned incense sticks in a basin, rushed out of the bedroom and went upstairs to settle alone in a room.

With the music DayⅥ, composed by Qlafur Arnalds, overflowing around me, I couldn’t bear it anymore. The fact that grandma was gone turned absolute, but her figure sometimes flashed through my vision and her voice calling my name in dialect occasionally echoed around my ears. My stony heart was gradually overwhelmed by a feeling of sadness and regret as I looked back to find that I had not treated her well and came to realize that I would never ever have a chance to make up for it. At the thought of this, I couldn’t help weeping, with eyes swimming in tears soon. I should have come back earlier to accompany her to live out the last remainder of her life, but I hadn’t, and contrarily I had grown indifferent to her since she became forgettable and needed being looked after. This dismal music freed my sadness and I savored every drop of it.

At twilight, I crossed a babbling brook and paused to throw a long, reminiscent look over a fence at the vegetable garden, where I used to accompany grandma to farm as a child. Now the field grew full of weeds.