In Memory of a Mother | Part 8

December, 2020, one night in the hospital, while her son was bathing her with a steaming towel, she cooed:

"Now I have you taking care of me, but what will become of you? When you are at my age, who will go to so much trouble to look after you? Our Master teaches us that any worldly attachment of mortal beings should be severed, but how am I supposed to rest assured that you will live a happy life?" She waxed sentimental about one of her regrets, "You still haven't found a girl to settle down; how long will you keep me waiting?"

It seemed that he had a natural talent for blowing up any possible relationship every time he was about to engage with someone. He was too wimpish to get used to the fluidity, complexity, cruelty, and treachery in the cat-and-mouse game between men and women. He squeezed the towel, unfolded it, rested it on her back, left the hot steam soothing her skin, and consoled her:

"We only accept the love we think we deserve."

December, 2020, the only way to keep her alive was to perform kidney dialysis three or more times a week, without which her face, limbs, hands, feet, abdomen would all swell into balloons.

"Now being like this, how am I supposed to help you anymore? My diseases have cost us too much, now how can I help you get married?" Something clogging her throat, she managed to suppress the emotion, without shedding a tear.

"Don't think that much. As soon as you get recovered, you'll figure that out."

Jan 1, 2021, it was the last day before she went unconscious. At noon, her son found the white of her right eye had puffed up. He asked her if she could still see him. She could barely respond. He sensed the inevitability. He picked up her shriveled hand, gently patting and rubbing the back of it, as if just talking to himself:

"I don't know what your shitty religion has told you. But I picture the relative brevity of life by imagining an infinitesimal speck of spotlight creeping along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything before or after the spotlight is shrouded in the absolute darkness of the dead past, or the daunting darkness of the unknown future. We are staggeringly lucky to find ourselves in the spotlight, and even more so to find those we cherish in it too. Walking side by side, we find the darkness before or after us seems not that intimidating."

He wasn't sure if she understood what he was saying. She had sunken into herself.

Jan 4th, 2021, 7:29 am, her heart stopped beating.

Her son willed himself to remember every critical detail about her during the final parting. The night before her cremation, he was leaning on the glass coffin all through, murmuring in her ear, gazing into the wrinkles on her face, trying to memorize where exactly they were.

He spent the whole night laboriously composing the eulogy he was about to give in her funeral next day. How could he boil a whole world of her down into a five-minute speech? A woman who had been the only one loving him that much seemed altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether overnight; "A woman beloved is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world", and how could a world simply cease altogether all of a sudden?

The moment he pressed the button to send her into the incinerator, he sensed alleviation: it seemed that her world of suffering and misery had no bearing on her anymore. If there really would be reincarnations and her soul be stuck in the hollow shell of a mortal being once more, they shall never, ever meet again.

"Go to be a happier daughter, wife, and mother of someone better."