I had wanted to write these words down for a long time.
On the first day of the Lunar New Year, I drove with my mother to visit my grandmother. She is ninety-six this year, and she has been bedridden for more than a year. By now, she seems to be living in a fog of confusion, her mind half-clear and half-lost. Most of the family members are already strangers to her. The people she still appears to remember are her son, her two daughters, and me.
The reason she remembers me is strangely simple. On her eightieth birthday, I gave her a birthday couplet wishing her a long life. It has hung on the wall across from her ever since, right where she can see it from bed. Maybe seeing it every day keeps prompting her memory: who gave this to me, and who is that person?
To be honest, I have never liked visiting elderly people who seem to be nearing the end of life. That does not mean I am unfilial. It is just that every time I stand in front of someone in that state, I feel the pressure of death drawing closer and closer. The feeling is hard to name. More often than not, I find myself thinking that if my grandmother could leave quickly and without pain, it might bring a kind of release—not only to her, but also to me and to everyone who worries about her.
And yet death seems unwilling to take her.
I cannot explain why. I do not believe in ghosts, spirits, or superstitions, but there were several times when she had already fallen into a deep coma and, without any clear awareness, told us that her husband was calling for her, summoning her away. Once, the hospital even refused to admit her. We took her back home, expecting the worst, and after a few days she somehow recovered again. All we could say was that her life force was astonishingly stubborn.
People of our generation are bound to encounter many departures. Every time someone is sent off, what remains inside is not only grief, but also a shapeless sense of loss and helplessness. Sometimes it lingers for days, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for years.
I often feel that unless a person comes close to death, they cannot fully understand the beauty and pleasure of being alive. But if you stand too close to it, the darkness it casts can drain you. Sorrow, pain, and the negative emotions they leave behind do not disappear quickly.
Death itself is not what frightens me most. What is frightening is the waiting—the slow, painful passage toward it. If dying were like shutting down a system, if it were only a single press of a button, all memory cleared from storage, the machine powered off in an instant, then how simple and light that would be. But most of the time, death is neither simple nor light. It drags on. It hurts.
I have seen too many people worn down by illness before they died. The final moments of those departures have stayed with me. I still cannot forget the look of reluctance in them, the sense that they were leaving with unfinished feelings and regrets they could not put down.
Lately I have been thinking about death often—about how one is supposed to face it, and how to arrange the things one hopes to do before it arrives. In other words, once you have truly looked at the fear of death, you ought to live the present with even greater clarity.
Death is not something people like to talk about in daily life, but every one of us will eventually have to face it. There is sadness in living with the awareness of death, but there is also a kind of warning in it: life is short, the world changes without notice, and the only way to briefly forget pain and fear is to cherish the present and the people we love while they are still beside us.