Grandpa's gone

When grandpa was alive, I often dreamed that he was dead. He was dead, and I often dreamed that he was still alive.

That night, he said to me smoking a pipe, I'm going to Benxi. Do you want to go with me? I said, what are you doing? He said, I want to find my brother.

In the early days of New China, his brother fled to the northeast. I don't know what a coincidence, he became the secretary of Benxi Steel Plant. The scenery is so beautiful that the whole village knows that he became a big official in the northeast. However, when his mother died, she was catching up with China in steelmaking. As a steel city, Benxi bore the brunt and did not come back to attend the funeral, becoming the unfilial son of the whole village population.

I said, your brother has been dead for more than twenty years. You can't find him when you go to Benxi. His two sons, one who immigrated to Germany and the other who immigrated to Japan, are no longer in Benxi. He is hard of hearing and I am loud. He said, it's okay. I'm dead, too. I suddenly realized that he's dead, too.

I always wake up in this dream, afraid that I am in the same world with him and that I will die. In countless strange dreams, he talked to me and said what he had not had time to say before he died. He died in a hurry and had a lot to say, and no one wanted to listen to him.

There were no signs before he died, so that our family didn't know when he left. During that time, my father had moved to a new building, and my grandfather was still in the old house in the old village, surrounded by torn walls covered with pumpkin vines, several elderly people who were not qualified to live in the building like him, and several chickens who could not go upstairs.

Father said that it was uncomfortable to go to grandpa's house that day and open the door of the hall, because grandpa liked to get up early. He always put on the stove, burned some white water and made a cup of tea, but it was very cold and there was no temperature in the room that day.

Father walked into the back room and found grandpa sitting by the bed with his arm on the old blue-gray book table beside the bed, thinking he was sitting and writing. Grandpa likes to write, and he writes very well. Father coughed, but didn't answer. He gave another cry and still didn't answer. Father went over and touched his arm and found that people were already cold. It should have been gone for some time. As for when, I don't know. Maybe I didn't sleep in the middle of the night, and I've been sitting. Or maybe I get up after midnight and sit in bed until I die.

2

Grandpa is the "persuasion of the dead" in the village, and his death is a major event in the village. In the past, he did everything. Those half-dead people, he always advised them to die and suffer for themselves. Don't be a burden to their family. People who have died, he will persuade them to leave with peace of mind, and don't come back to life again, scaring their families.

I don't know how grandpa became the manager of white affairs. In my opinion, it should be that he has some influence in the village. People who master the life and death of a village must have certain skills. Grandpa is the first batch of high school students in New China. At that time, high school was much more expensive than doctors now. But because of family problems, he didn't go to college, which became his lifelong regret.

My father always said that he had no ambition. A high school student of the same age in New China only works as a white-collar worker in the village, which became an excuse for his father to look down on him. That I have never heard the word father from my father. To him, father was a strange word until I appeared.

Grandpa has many classmates who have become county officials, county heads, deputy secretaries of county committees and office directors, not because they are better than my grandfather, but because they are poor peasants and middle peasants, which gives them an innate advantage. Grandpa was born as a landlord, which not only disqualified him from going to college, but also affected his career.

Grandpa used to help students from poor families, so those students who became big officials often came to him. I like the days when his classmates visited, which are usually early summer. Cicada is not so arrogant, the weather is not so hot, and there are no swarms of flies in the yard. They came to visit grandpa by car, first Santana and Laohongqi, then Passat and Audi.

There are people outside our house, and everyone wants to see which precious guests have come to our house. Of course I'm proud. I'm cocky every time, because I've eaten white rabbit toffee that they can't eat, and even photographed polaroid. As soon as the camera is pressed, the photo comes out directly. I thought it was amazing, so I showed them around.

After each time, my father said that he also graduated from high school. Look at others, everyone is doing well, and look at your grandfather, regardless of anything, the biggest position-the leader of the party group. But for him, as a child of a landlord's family, being able to join the party has already paid the price of dozens of pounds of pork, which is not a small sum, because although this family was characterized as a landlord, it has already been looted and its life is very poor. Grandpa told me that officials have official lives, and people's luck and fate are beyond anyone's control.

When grandpa was sixty, his classmates never came again, and his expectations were reduced by half every summer. At first, the news came that the county magistrate got rich and died before he retired. Later, the deputy secretary of the county party Committee committed suicide suddenly because of a safety accident. The director of the office was promoted and went to the county next door as a deputy magistrate, but he died in a car accident on the way to the inspection soon. In the end, none of them survived my grandfather.

Grandpa said that people have three thresholds, sixty-one, seventy-three and eighty-four. If you live to be over eighty-four, you can live to be a hundred. I don't know if this is supported by probability statistics. In the days to come, I often hear these figures. Perhaps, he looked at life and death too much, and he summed up some rules.

three

Father is grandpa's eldest son. He seems alienated from his grandfather and never talks for a long time. My father, holding his breath, worked hard step by step from a private teacher to a school district principal at the age of forty. Every step was not easy, and my father didn't go to college. During the Cultural Revolution, the college entrance examination was cancelled, and universities implemented the recommendation system. Of course, because of the composition problem, my father also missed the opportunity to go to college. In the same way, two generations lost their dreams because of the label of a landlord, further widening the gap between their parents and grandparents.

My father didn't bow to fate. At the age of six, his mother hanged herself, but he never stopped. The motivation to support him is not to live like grandpa.

When my father became the principal, the family boasted a little money and decided to buy a school fund-raising building in the city. When I was ten years old, I left the village and moved to a building in the city. I didn't come back to live for a long time.

After more than ten years, I only come back to live in winter and summer vacations, but I never stay overnight because I think my grandfather's house is dirty. Then I went to college and moved away from home. I seldom went home to see him, and my hometown became a place I could never go back to.

I didn't think of him again until I received the news of his death. At that time, I haven't been home for a long time. The pressure of work and family has made me a wanderer working hard in a strange city, and I dare not slack off at all.

The phone call was from my father. He said, pack your luggage and come back quickly, still in that commanding tone. Father has never spoken like this. I heard some strange things. I said, what happened? He said, your grandfather is dead. I didn't hear anything. For many years, my father and grandfather rarely talked, and everything was taken care of by my mother.

A few years ago, grandpa got herpes zoster, and the herpes with purulent blood covered his waist. At first, my mother went to the barefoot doctor in the village. The doctor said that she was allergic, so just apply some medicine. I didn't expect it to get worse. My mother insisted on applying medicine to grandpa, but it didn't work. Father seldom cares and doesn't ask.

four

At that time, I hurried home and saw that grandpa's illness was very serious. Herpes tore the scab and covered his back. Taking him to the county hospital, the doctors were stunned by this situation. They have never seen such a serious "snake spot sore".

As the saying goes, "snake sores" wrap around the waist and are hopeless. At that time, he was bony, with high cheekbones and sunken eyes. In his eighties, he lay hunched back in a hospital bed covered with white sheets and was silent.

He used to like talking to me best, and only I liked listening to him. His story has a magical realism, which deeply attracted me and became the material for my writing now. The previous "Persuade Death to Promote Life" is based on his story prototype. In addition, he also took me to all kinds of white things, of course, not to let me inherit his career, but to have all kinds of delicious food in white things. Grandpa took me to the kitchen. They cried very sadly and I ate very happily.

I said, grandpa, say something. He said, Xiao Fei, thank you for taking me to the hospital. Hearing this sentence, I suddenly want to cry. Thank you for making us far away. My grandfather who loved me suddenly disappeared and even the outline became blurred.

He lay there bent, unable to straighten, and never straightened. During the Great Leap Forward, three ribs on both sides of his abdomen were interrupted by a chassis car and stuck to his liver, gallbladder and spleen and stomach, which was close to death. He didn't receive treatment, made up a few centimeters, rested for a month, and went back to work. However, the lack of rib support and perennial bending deformed his spine. Since then, he has never stood up straight in his thirties, just like the rest of his life.

At night, I was in the hospital, as if I saw the huge shadow of death approaching at night, covering the whole ward. But there is also a tenacious temperament that is also displayed on this aging body. It is an optimism shaped by suffering and fate, and an open-minded person who is used to life and death. It tells us that people in front of us will not give in easily, even to death.

A few weeks later, grandpa finally let go. When he was discharged from the hospital, I had already left. I called my mother and asked about him from time to time. My mother always reports good news instead of bad news, saying nothing. Don't worry. But I know how terrible the sequelae of herpes zoster are. One of my doctoral classmates said that the sequela of this disease is like 10 thousand ants biting your nerve again, but you can't see it. Many people choose suicide because they can't persist.

I don't know how he survived these three years, one after another. Ten thousand ants are eating his body every day. He never even told his father how miserable he was and needed his son's comfort. He just asked his mother for some painkillers. He also grows poppies, which may come in handy in difficult days.

It took him three years to convince himself to face death bravely, just like everyone he persuaded. There is only endless pain in this world, and it is only a moment to leave this world. When he died, he was like a statue, like an arhat in Buddhism and a saint in Christianity. He sat on the edge of the bed and froze the pain of that moment forever, but he was free and went to a world without pain.

I sat in the green leather car on my way home and crossed the whole Shandong, from the humid Pacific coastal city to the dry Mount Tai. Every time the train hits the tracks, I feel the time pass. As it passed, it became a scenery along the way and a memory of life.

I know, that place called hometown can never go back. The man whom I call his grandfather will live in my heart forever.