雪風書齋：型正院宅男署

Let Go off the Past into the Hands of the Lord

Stepping into the parlor, I saw my mother giving worship to our ancestors. Then I figured out it was the same date when my grandmother, who taught me to gain no foe, passed away several years ago; the worship reminded me of my grandparents’ later days all.

My grandparents loved each other the way people having a long, long time lived together. They were the loveliest persons whom I love in the whole wide world. They were simple farm people. Their world was the fruit trees, the rice-field and
the backyard with its pigs and chickens. The rest of the earth was far away—like the stars in the sky.

Sometimes my grandfather, a tough-willed man throughout his life, worried about death in his later years. During his anxiety, he would raise his aged voice and say, “I’d like to see my two lovely grandsons, and that at once. You hear me, wife, the one whose hands in mine? Now help me call them up! I want to get hold of them!” “No you hush, husband,” my grandmother would reply. “If you keep talking like that, I will go away and leave you alone. Sometimes I will rise up and walk out of here and then what were you to do? There’s nobody to look after you. Stop worrying nonsense and make the phone call yourself!”

Grandpa knew his wife would never leave him. The only leaving he feared was death’s coming. He often wondered how he could live without grandma. When he moved in the bed during the night, she would always hold him tight, speaking to him, “Husband, now be quiet and ease your mind, or you’ll drive me in a bind.” “Well, I cannot sleep, wife,” said my grandpa. “If you stop rolling about so much, you’ll fall asleep pretty soon, and then I can have some rest, too,” said my grandma. Knowing she was forever there by him on such a dark midnight made him at peace again.

One day in that early autumn, right there in the chilly mountain, suddenly made  Atropos her sicken, and then silently away she was taken. Her aging husband, left in a fog of sorrow and harrow, watched the morticians put her ashes into the niche.

Thereafter, he tried to keep working around the farm, but it was of no damn use cutting off the harm; it was truly difficult to return to an empty house sleeping without her arm. At night he read a newspaper, trying to while away all the lengthy witching hour, inevitably missing my garrulous grandmother, yet most of the time he just sat still there, looking at the floor, wondering where my grandma was, who he was, and how soon out of Hades would crawl along his decease.

Given the joss stick, I, with profound piety, worship my loveliest grandparents, mourning for something of nonexistence. I’ve learned and realized that, for both the dead and the living, I should let go off my grandparents peacefully away into the hands of the Lord.

—— Yukikaze Studio ~ Department of Solemn Men, Metrosexual Yuan ——

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