Secondhand Funeral

I’m writing it here so my family will never see it.

A few days ago, I read Qigang Chen’s Sorrow and Joy from the Same Source, in which he writes about his son, who passed away. Reviews recommend the book for its literary authenticity, but the grief running through his words was suffocating. Reading him made me understand why I don’t particularly like Yiyun Li. I’ve always felt that true grief, even expressed in the calmest language, leaves visible tear stains on the page. As I turned to the pages where he remembered his son, I could almost feel the dampness of the paper beneath my fingertips.

Sometimes I wonder what exactly other people lose when someone leaves.

The person they once were is gone, and so is the person you were with them. When someone disappears from your life completely, you no longer know whether you still exist in their world. Whether the past you shared still exists in the same way. Aging, separation, loss, death. What is it that we mourn? The future of theirs we will never know, or the part of our former selves that existed in their world? After all, you already have the person they once were. No one can take those memories from you. You just no longer see yourself in their eyes.

I don’t believe we ever overcome loss. What is lost is already gone.

All the advice on how to stop hurting seems to amount to finding ways not to press on the wound, and sometimes the wound never heals.

Perhaps it moves. On the first day, it is on your heart, throbbing with every breath. After a month, it is on the back of your hand. You still think about it, and every time you see it, you are reminded. After a year, it is on your leg, occasionally brushed by the denim of your jeans. Ten years later, it is on your back, and only once in a great while do you catch a glimpse of the wound in the mirror.

I’m fortunate that most of my family is still healthy and around me. But a few years ago, my uncle developed an illness that was difficult to treat, and he later died unexpectedly.

At first, my parents kept his diagnosis from my grandparents. They continued to hide it until his condition could no longer be explained away by any ordinary illness, until eventually he could no longer walk. At the time, I couldn’t understand how they thought they could possibly keep it a secret. Perhaps the three of them were still holding on to the hope that he might recover. I remember seeing my parents quietly taking my uncle from one doctor to another. Denial, and believing there is something to be done, are such profoundly human responses to devastation. No work of literature could have made me understand this any better.

I don’t think I knew him very well.

I only remember that he was kind to me when I was little. I don’t know whether I’ve deliberately forgotten what he looked like when he was ill, or whether I simply didn’t see him very often during those years. Perhaps what little I remember comes not from my own memories at all, but from my mother’s sorrowful retellings.

Since then, my family rarely ate the foods my uncle used to love. My mother is convinced that one of them must have been responsible for her brother’s death.

When there is nothing one can blame.

I remember my cousin was still very young then. He came to visit his father and played excitedly with the electric wheelchair around the house. I was old enough. I stood there, looking at my cousin, knowing before he did that his life had already changed.

I also remember the day my uncle died.

I had just finished my after-school class. I remember wearing a red jacket. The boy I had a crush on talked to me that day. Then my mother called. She told me she couldn’t pick me up, that my uncle had died and she needed to catch a flight to his city immediately.

It was only much later that I realized I didn’t understand what death meant at that moment.

Of course I knew what the word meant.

But when she said she had to rush there, I imagined he was still in the hospital, perhaps being resuscitated, and that his family needed to go take care of him.

But that wasn’t it. Before that phone call, before even that, he was already gone. Completely.

I sometimes wonder whether my uncle died before or after that boy talked to me. I don’t know why it matters to me. It doesn’t, really. But I wonder.

I still don’t think I knew him well. He was my mother’s brother, my grandparents’ son, but we lived in different cities, after all. He used to be a relative in my life I took for granted. Strangely, I only began to know him as a person after his death.

I cannot imagine what my grandmother must have felt. My grandfather, who has grown a little forgetful, refused to replace a phone he had been using for ten years. We only realized later that it was because my uncle bought it for him. My cousin is grown now. I wonder how he remembers that last little piece of his childhood.

Avoidance is all we have left. We no longer go near the old house, we don’t see the friends we used to know. My grandparents even fled the city where they had lived for more than fifty years. But there is no escape from dumplings.

Even if we don’t eat them, everyone around us does. Every Lunar New Year, they’re in the supermarkets, on television, in every holiday commercial. Even the ads are full of the damn dumplings. They were his favorite.

Every celebration now holds a small, silent funeral in the basement. My grief comes from watching every member of my family lose him again and again, on every occasion when he should have been there. I can only piece together who he was from the memories that occasionally spill out of them, and we will never really know what piece we were in his life.

This weekend, I visited my grandfather’s sister. Our branches of the family live in different countries, so my grandparents rarely get the chance to see her. She cautiously asked about my uncle’s death. It turned out that, even after all these years, she still didn’t know what had actually happened.

That sounds about right. We never talk about these things. Losing a family member leaves a wound that never quite scabs over.

We try not to touch each other’s backs.