The 4th Peking University Qingming Forum 2022 was recently held in Beijing and Shanghai (online format). This forum advocates a positive view of life and death - the form of death can be more beautiful, the reverie of death can be warmer, and faith can make life full of strength. The following is the keynote speech delivered by Jing Yidan, the former host of CCTV, at the forum.
My mother joined the revolution when she was in middle school, and then she worked in public security all her life, and she was a very strong person.
When my mom was 88 years old, she was diagnosed with cancer. In the last days of her life, she underwent surgery and radiation therapy, but there was no cure. I thought: What can I do for her? Watching her endure so much pain, I didn't know what my company would bring her. She was a person with great mental strength, but when she lay in her hospital bed, I felt a particularly strange feeling, that is, a feeling of powerlessness. Growing up, I was able to get a kind of spiritual strength from my mother. So, can I also bring spiritual strength to my mother?
Jing Yidan's mother
One thing my mom did after she retired was to sort out more than 60 years of family letters from the time my parents were in love, all the way to the time our family was in the same house. These letters are the most precious to my mother, the spiritual wealth she left to her children. So, at my mother's bedside, I talked to her about these letters every day. Later, I also did one thing, compiling these 1700 family letters into a book, because I wanted my mother to know that we cared very much about what she did, that her retention was too precious, that it was our heirloom.
My mom and my dad's earliest home letters were written from 1950. Then they got married, one by one children were born, and then they had a second generation, until our family was four generations together. The letter involved my grandmother and grandfather and told the story of five generations of the family. This book is for my daughter, my nephew, my nephew and these children, I especially want the children to know, our grandmother, grandfather, grandfather, grandmother is what kind of people, how the blood of this family is inherited, the name of this book is called "That Year, That Letter".
I am especially grateful to my mother, after so many turbulent years, after so many family changes, these letters have been well preserved. The day I compiled the letters into a book and gave them to my mother, she was doing radiation therapy, and I saw a different kind of light in her eyes. It was the last book she would ever read. The book had been on the pillow of her hospital bed, and the nurses had read it and said to her, "Grandma, you are such a person." This affirmation came not only from the people around me, but also from some readers, and I also told my mother in time, which became a spiritual comfort in her last moments of life.
Ever since she got this disease, I've been wrestling with whether to tell her the truth. She was a very clear-headed person, so I finally told her that I believed my mother could stand it. Sure enough, she held on. In my mom's last days, there was no forbidden area for conversation between us, and I felt that was a reflection of the quality of life.
Later, my mother's hearing gradually weakened, and finally she could not hear. In order to communicate with her, we wrote her various small notes from the hospital bed. Usually after she reads the note, she will nod. She needs to know the information, and she needs to clearly follow her own path.
Once, my mom was going to have a gastric tube operation, and my brother wanted to let my mom know about the procedure, so he drew a flow chart of the operation himself. The doctor looked at the picture and said it was exactly right. My brother wasn't a medical student, but in front of his mother's bed, he suddenly had this incredible ability. Those notes, those pictures, let my mother understand clearly, be able to accept soberly, for her it is like a light in the dark.
Jing Yidan and Mom and Dad
The final farewell moment is approaching. I remember once, I was standing in front of my mother's hospital bed, and she looked at me for a long time and said to me: You write about this experience, I can't write. My mother has always had the habit of recording, and the letters she left behind are to share what she has seen and heard and what she has learned about life with the children. In her hospital bed, she was unable to record, so she asked me to write down the experience, which was the last "homework" my mother left for me.
After my mother left, we held a solemn funeral for her. At the funeral, instead of playing ordinary funeral music, we put on a song that my mother recorded before she died, and she sang "Children Walk a Thousand Miles". She learned to sing the song herself after hearing the chorus in Yuyuantan, Beijing, and she was in her 80s when she went to the studio to record the song. Finally, we said goodbye to my mom in her singing, singing around the beams and flowers, and I think that's what mom wants. At the funeral, the fourth generation of our family's children took his favorite toy and buried it in the land by the Songhua River, and he fulfilled a farewell wish. No panic, no fear, I think, this is also the first life lesson for him.
To fulfill my mother's instructions, I picked up a pen to write about the experience. However, the process of writing was so painful that I picked up the pen several times and interrupted it several times. My sister said you don't write it, it hurts too much. But I felt that my mother was using the last strength of her life to leave us with a reflection on life, so I finally completed this book "Bright Moonlight Before the Bed". The bed in front of the hospital bed slowly darkened, but it was not without light, this light was as clear as water, like moonlight, it was a soft light of life, a light that brought us warmth.
This book records my feelings and inspirations of accompanying my mother through the last journey of her life. When I wrote this book, the COVID-19 pandemic happened, and it was really painful. This book is not just about remembering my mother, it's not just about how our family faced life and death. For me, this is actually a very important process of understanding life. After the book was published, the Central People's Radio decided to record it as an audiobook. After recording it twice, my voice suddenly went dumb and I couldn't speak. But in the end, I got it done.
During the Qingming Festival, the "Voice of Reading" program of the Central People's Radio will also rebroadcast this audiobook. I look forward to each of us being able to record our thoughts about life in words, to be able to communicate with more people, and to gain and improve in the process of communication.
We have been saying that at the end of life, we must wait and accompany our loved ones, but what kind of companionship is quality companionship? It's not that waiting at the bedside is companionship, I think the most quality companionship is spiritual companionship. That is to say, when we say goodbye to our loved ones, we should discover his spiritual needs from the deepest part of our hearts and then satisfy him. Only the satisfaction of spiritual needs can make him truly peaceful, and can make him say goodbye to us without regrets. So, there is quality companionship, which must be full of love.