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My grandfather passed away at the age of ninety. While a lifespan of ninety years is frequently considered lengthy by contemporary standards, the actual experience of his demise was profoundly painful and overwhelmingly disorienting for me. For many years preceding his death, I engaged in a concerted psychological effort to prevent the harsh reality of his impending loss from infiltrating my consciousness. I meticulously documented his oral histories, preserved photographs and voice recordings, and even directed my university research toward his unique linguistic dialect. My intention was to preserve every minute detail of his existence, effectively creating a monument to his life. Yet, when the moment of death arrived, he was gone instantly. My ambitious, multifaceted project to preserve his essence had failed completely, revealing the stark futility of trying to arrest the finality of death.
His final days moved with surprising velocity. Following a serious fall, he underwent surgery, but the attending physician delivered a grim prognosis regarding his medical condition. My uncle decided to transport him home from the hospital, despite my strong advocacy that he remain under the specialized care of medical professionals. My grandfather took his last breath almost immediately after being returned to his own bed. A relative warned me sharply, "Do not let your tears fall on him!" I knelt beside him, feeling shocked and deeply sorrowful, yet I was prohibited from touching him to offer a proper, personal farewell. A strict series of traditional rituals began immediately. Incense was lit, and special paper currency was burned in designated fires. His clothes were changed, and specific ceremonial actions were performed according to custom. My uncles and male cousins led all the activities, while my mother and I, as women, were instructed to wait outside, separated from the direct handling of the body.
These rituals began to fundamentally alter my relationship with my grandfather. He was no longer just the individual I had known; he was now an integral component of a larger family and cultural system. Strangely, over the next three days, this very system began to loosen my tight, personal grip on my grief. My grandmother later recounted that before he died, my grandfather kept repeating that he wanted to go home. He was confused due to his dementia. "Which home?" she would ask. "You are home." She referred to their city apartment. Yet, on the day he died, our family transported his body back to the rural village of his childhood.
"Even with all the city life," one funeral leader explained, "people who do well in the world often still go home to die."
My last visit to this village was six years ago for my language research. Now, I returned as a mourner. I felt I was merely one small component of a vast family network. Many people present were related to my grandfather, and consequently, they were related to me as well. "How did you know my grandfather?" I asked one of the community leaders. His reply was short but deeply meaningful: "His story is still talked about." This was true even though he had not resided there for seventy years.
His death belonged not just to the family, but to the land itself. On the first morning, we walked in a long procession across farm fields and over rolling hills. We concluded by kneeling beside a farm pond, where we bowed low, pressing our foreheads to the earth. The path was rough underfoot, and the sun was intensely hot. Against a backdrop of green mountains, white funeral banners marked the sacred space. We bowed toward the mountain peaks while leaders chanted songs to local spirits, recounting the story of my grandfather's journey. The main funeral tent was set up exactly where his old house had been, a structure now demolished. A large red carpet covered the spot. For three days, I spent hours kneeling on that red fabric.
I tried to move with the rhythm of the chants. Sometimes I cried, and my tears darkened the red fabric. More often, I was simply hot and deeply exhausted. Dressed in white mourning clothes, we were not individuals anymore. We were symbols of my grandfather's continuing family line. The chanted words were mostly a mystery to me. Through the fatigue and the repeated bowing, I understood one crucial thing: my personal feelings did not matter here. The ritual had its own independent purpose and logic that transcended individual emotion.
The rituals seemed to celebrate death by affirming life, and to affirm life by openly facing death. This philosophical concept appears in traditions like the Qingming Festival in early April. It is a day for honoring ancestors and cleaning graves. It is also a day for spring picnics, enjoying flowers, and flying kites. Mixing respect for the dead with joy in the living season is a classic part of Chinese tradition, illustrating a complex acceptance of the cycle of existence.
Hundreds of people—relatives, friends, and villagers—gathered on the site of the old house. We shared large communal meals. Facing death, eating together became vitally important. It revived old connections. Cousins, now adults, remembered childhood bonds. The red carpet soon became messy: covered in sunflower seed shells, marked by cigarette burns, and stained with spit. Seeing my grandfather's coffin at the back of the tent, I first felt this mess was disrespectful. But then I remembered a birthday party years ago. My grandfather had happily spat sunflower seed shells on the ground, following local custom. If he had been at his own funeral gathering, he probably would have done the same. Realizing this, I let a single shell fall from my hand onto the red carpet, accepting the chaos as a form of life.
My grandfather's final return home happened on the last day. We walked in a long, three-hour procession through the fields. A horn played, and gongs beat loudly. My eldest cousin carried my grandfather's portrait high. Behind him, male villagers carried the coffin on their shoulders. We walked backwards, facing the portrait, and bowed often. A distant relative placed a live rooster on the coffin for spiritual protection. My mother walked beside the coffin, as if offering physical support.
Going down a steep slope, she whispered through tears, "Be careful, Baba," like she was still guiding his wheelchair. Firecrackers exploded regularly. At each bang, we stopped and bowed to villagers watching from the roadside. My uncle handed out cigarettes and towels as gifts. We walked, stopped, bowed, and walked again. Our bodies were performing a ceremony of mourning, often beyond our immediate thoughts. The physical exertion was a tangible expression of our internal state, synchronized by the rhythm of the gongs and the explosions of the firecrackers.
On the last afternoon, as we knelt on the carpet again, an ant began a slow climb across my hand. The comparison was clear: our small importance against the lasting mountains was like the ant's small importance against us. Watching the insect, I saw it as a symbol for myself, for my grandfather, for anyone moving through loss. The rituals felt both cruel and kind. They were not personal. They forced me to see I was part of something bigger: the family, the land, the chain of life. My personal grief, against that huge backdrop, found its proper size and place.
The final act was burning a detailed paper model of a house, along with my grandfather's clothes. We walked three times around the blazing model. A huge fire of offerings burned on one side, and fireworks exploded on the other. The heat finally drove me back. I watched from a distance as his things turned into a pile of gray ash, the physical remnants of his earthly life dissolving into the atmosphere.
The last thing we did together was walk down the hill to a relative's house. There, we cooled our thirst with green-bean popsicles—the exact kind my grandfather had always loved. This simple act of consumption marked the transition from the intense, structured world of ritual back to the quiet continuity of life. The pain of loss had not vanished, but the rigid isolation of my personal sorrow had dissolved. I had been returned to the flow of the river of my ancestors, where the dead and the living move together, bound by memory and the enduring earth. The journey home was complete, not just for him, but for the family that remained.