My Grandpa's Death

Yesterday I participated in table topic session in a joint meeting between Taicang TMC and Taiyuan TMC, I got the question “say something about your ancestors (at least your grandpa’s parent generation)”, but I don’t know them. So I talked about my grandpa. And friends from Taiyuan asked for the brief summary about my talk. So I decided to write it down, not only the summary, but the whole story.

My grandpa is the head of the village, and I’m always proud of mentioning it. He is already an old man when I could barely remember him, a really old man, who almost only can sit in his chair with quietness. So there are only few things that are still lingering in my mind about him. And the most memorable is his death.

That was a nothing special morning for me, with the age of 5, I work up in the darkness and found there was only me at home. I was a little scared and tried hard to hold tears in my eyes and hold pee in my bladder. I walked towards the front door and tried to get out to release my pee, and maybe with pee going out, tears can go back as the body is not that full any more. But when I arrived at the front door, the door cannot be opened, being locked from the outside. So I began to push and shook the door out of fear. Maybe because of shaking, tears began to burst out of my eyes, like water overflowing the cup. I don’t remember how long it lasted I shook the door and cried, it looks very long actually it’s not. When I shook the door and cried, the sky turned whiter and whiter which marked deeply in my mind forever, like a short movie. And I even stopped crying when the sky turned white, because I was a little shocked with the unbelievable change in the sky which I never saw before. I even got moments that I was not sure whether it’s my crying power to make the sky turn white,which made confused and a little bit more shocked. Not long after that, the sky turned pure white, the darkness faded totally, and my sister’s grandma came to open the door.

Later, my grandpa came home with a lot of people, including my parents, my elder uncle and younger aunt. I know my grandpa has already been condemned to death by the hospital. The adults took off the front door I just pushed and shook, and let my almost-dying grandpa lie on it. Maybe it’s a tradition,I don’t know. My elder uncle sat on the chief seat of the table with other people around, drinking and eating, with calmness and not-well-hidden sadness. My dying grandpa sometimes waved his hand and my elder uncle came to him with one ear on his mouth, my grandpa murmured something and my elder uncle nodded. It happened several times. And I still can remember my dad sat on a small stool, crying hardly for a while besides the front door. After that, I never saw my dad crying again.

This is almost everything I remembered about my grandpa’s death. When I tried to write this down this morning, I found that I really know almost nothing about my grandpa. And the question that Peng Yuan asked me,stories about my ancestors, I really know nothing, where they come from, what they did, who they are, totally nothing. Maybe I would ask the family elders and write them down, and edit it as a book, like <One Hundred Years Solitude>,a terrific book I like very much. And I already got a good name for the book,<孙家小院>. Last year, my sister’s grandpa passed away, he is the last grandpa-generation in my family. When he was alive, we initiated a family wechat group and got a quarrel how to name it. We got a lot ideas,孙宅，孙家豪宅，孙家大院，so on. Then he said, we are a small family, we are an ordinary family, we don’t go things that big, we call it孙家小院.And we all agreed. That’s how my family wechat group’s name comes from, how the book’s name comes from.

I got a small family, I got an ordinary family. People now all die after one hundred years, like my grandpa. But it's okay, this is life, people come people go. The only thing we can do about it is to cherish and enjoy what we got. I hope everything goes alright with my family, everything goes alright with孙家小院. Everyone in my family cherish it, everyone in my family enjoy it.

It's really a good post, though nothing to do with this article