China dying

In mid-2023, Christy's grandfather passed away suddenly at the age of 100 (in accordance with the Chinese way to count age). It doesn't feel right to say that someone so old could die "unexpectedly" but in his case, it was against all expectation. My wife had made it over to China just days before it happened, and  Over a year later, as recounted in Crypticity's abound: Life and death of the villages.

This year, I have had the weird privilege of having attended a New Zealand funeral and a Chinese 葬礼 within a couple of months. My Uncle John passed in the first month of this year. For me, it was a surprise, but apparently his heart surgery three years ago had a three year warranty and that it wasn’t necessarily unexpected that he would pass. Though I in all honesty did not have much time with him as we always lived far from where he lived, he always impressed me as a vigorous, kind person. My second cousin Michael, his son, did a great eulogy, talking about his father, who had passed in front of an unnecessarily complicated jigsaw puzzle after making a dryer than usual Christmas cake. You could say it was a good death in that he had a clearly good life which was taken while enjoying life.

My Sam Gung was different. Sam Gung, A Gung's younger cousin, had been struggling for years. Sam Gung was literally a neighbour in the hometown so I knew him well. He was an educated man; he was the one that the village trusted to put into characters the words of ceremony. When big things happened, he was the one who wrote it in beautiful Chinese characters. He was one of the older people who didn’t have any hesitation in welcoming me and speaking with me. When I was back previously he had been struggling with more than one obvious medical condition, and his wife was in the middle stages of Alzheimer’s. And now, a heart condition had struck him hard.

When we arrived, he was expected to pass at any moment. On one day when I had planned to be out with a friend, his family had brought him home from the hospital, and I was asked to come home earlier just so I could see him before anything happened. The “bringing back from the hospital” element is something cultural – I am not sure how often it happens in New Zealand, where people don’t have as many qualms about the elderly dying away from home. That day I didn’t manage to come home much earlier, but still I saw him. Whether he knew who I was depends on how compassionately you ask.

He was expected to pass quickly, and as he was close clan, there was some caution about planning travel. His immediate family members had, three years earlier, dropped everything when A-Gung passed to attend the funeral. But a few days later he was still alive and, according to some, even doing better.  

Three days before our expected trip to Shantou, there was quite the kerfuffle where members of the family had got anxious and wanted him to go back to hospital if he might pull through and make it to the year of the Horse. There was a cultural practicality about this. If he were to die on Chinese New Year’s Eve he might have no one attend the funeral. And it might have the double blow, culturally, of being inauspicious to 探亲 (visit relatives) of a grieving family during the Spring Festival period. So the argument was either to stay the inevitable course with him at home so he can have a village death, and accept whatever consequences with the timing, or to send him back to hospital and hope to buy a couple of weeks but also have the risk of him passing in the cold sterility of a hospital bed.

The latter side won, an ambulance was called late at night and the very next day died.

This was the first time I had been in China for the full process of someone dying. The evening of his passing, proceedings began with the clan gathering at the family home, the following day the body was brought to the home so he could rest in state. The children of the deceased and their partners have white hats or belts, and the children face the body for throughout the day and the night. Guests come in, light incense, bow three times before the body and then stand the incense in a stand before the body. Spiritual money is burned, too. During the three days, there are no speeches, eulogies, no photo collections or songs. I always find it incredible that the village people have enough to talk about for hours and hours. I talked with a grandson of Sam Gung for about an hour, but I was lucky as I didn’t know him and he knew barely anything about me. All the while, people come in to burn incense and there are firecrackers to notify the dead.

The family would stay up through the night but we are distant enough to have a night of sleep. The next morning there are the road rituals for the deceased to be able to be removed from the house and transported to the crematorium. For the road rituals I saw again the Daoist priest from A Gung’s memorial ceremonies. He did his thing and we walked around the coffin three times, and then waited for the equivalent of a hearse to take the body to the crematorium.

The crematorium was a half hour drive from the village so we had two buses ride along with the hearse and then waited our turn. Unseen by us, the body is prepared with flowers and put in a crematorium casket, and after some time, we’re called to the Farewell room, where we walk around the casket three times, and then he is taken into where he will be reduced to ashes. The family wait in a building similar to a bus station waiting area for an hour and then are told it is time to collect. Some members of the family go to check the ashes and bones are his. I was not part of that. And then these were interned into an urn and wheeled over with an umbrella cover to a small concretion designed for final rites. (An umbrella was maintained over the urn until it was buried.) The family then again burn incense, before it is taken to the bus for the ride to the village burial spot where his ashes would reside for a year. (There would be another ceremony to relocate him to his final, final resting spot at some stage later.) It was an interesting hike to a non-descript space for the burial spot, through brush and up a hill. His urn was placed and buried then incense was burned, and then an odd rice throwing ritual. And then that was that. We walked home.

In the land of the living, there remains his wife and the thorny issue of how you care for someone with Alzheimers who relied on her husband at home, and has never known life outside of the village.