I, in the U.S., heard my mother's voice one minute after she passed away in China. In November 2012, about one month before my mother was gone, I received the book Heaven is for Real, a present from an American friend. I read it from cover to cover, and by the time I finished it, I found it convincing, so I sent an e-mail to thank the friend with “Heaven is Real!” as the subject. The next day, I received from my brother in China a message telling me our mother died in the hospital at 3:35 P.M. (U.S. Central Time) the previous day. When I went back to check the time that I sent the email to the friend, I was astonished to find it was 3:36 P.M., which was one minute after my mother died.
“Heaven is Real!” must be her message to me from heaven. My mother was, I think, using numbers as her “voice” to let me know that it was she who was delivering the news to me. She once was a mathematics teacher in China. This time in her afterlife, her “voice” sounded like a digital voice. I recall her real voice in her life.
“Any news?” A high and clear voice was at the other end of the phone line, full of excitement. It was my mother's voice I used to hear weekly when I called my parents in China for a routine hello on weekends from the U.S. Whenever my answer was “No news,” she never said something like, “No news is good news.” Instead, she liked to say, “Then save your time and money. I'm busy with housework." Then she would hand the phone over to my father, as if she already got the whole picture of me just by hearing a few words. My father and I might go on for a long chat; a lower and unclear voice of my mother appeared in the background from time to time, and I felt she was still available if I needed her. This voice of my mother can no longer be heard. Since her death, however, her voice comes to me again and again from different moments of her life.
Once, I had a high fever when I was a toddler. My father carried me in his arms and rushed to the hospital. My mother accompanied him in a panic with her scared and sobbing voice all the way to the hospital, “Baby––, baby––, what's wrong? What's wrong? … My fault! … My fault!” The fever was gone quickly in the hospital, and I played around like a normal kid right away. When we went home, I reported to my grandmother, “Mommy cried, Mommy cried! Shame, shame!” Everyone laughed, including my mother, but she laughed with tears.
During my third-grade year, one day I refused to go to school because I thought my parents treated my brother better than me. I got very upset about the “unfairness.” To protest, I left home, wandering along the country road without a destination in my mind. My mother followed me, keeping a distance and calling my name repeatedly in a soft and comforting voice. After being followed for about an hour, I realized my thought about my parents' treatment was wrong. I was just too sensitive and they didn't mean to treat my brother and me differently at all. It was getting dark. I calmed down, ran back to my mother's chest, and said to her, “Mom, I'm sorry for making you walk so long. Let's go home.” She smiled with relief and said, “That's all right, my silly girl. See, everyone is equal –– YOU walk, I walk.” We laughed and hugged. I returned to school the next day.
Later I learned from my father that my mother quit her job as a middle school mathematics teacher a few months after I was born. She wanted to raise me––her first child––as a full-time mom. In fact, with the arrival of my brother, and my father's stroke in his sixties, my mother never returned to her work. She had been a full-time housewife, taking care of her children and her partially paralyzed husband, silently.
My mother didn't want to read the memoir my father finished in 2006; it was dedicated to my mother, brother and me. The memoir is mainly about our family's painful experiences during the Cultural Revolution in China, and, because of political sensitivity, it cannot be published publicly in China. As a high school Chinese teacher, my father was wrongly labeled as a counter-revolutionary. He was sent to the countryside to work as a peasant for eight years to “reform” until the end of 1978 (The Cultural Revolution was officially over in 1976). Because of the persecution he suffered, my mother, during that dark time, endured much pain and humiliation.
From the memoir, I learned that one night my mother was screaming, “Help me! … Someone help me!” in a very painful voice, at our apartment, alone. She was going into labor with my brother, but my father had been taken away that day, being subjected to a “struggle session,” which was common during the Cultural Revolution (at such a struggle session, in front of hundreds or thousands of people, a victim was criticized and even physically abused until he or she confessed to imaginary crimes). Fortunately, a neighbor heard my mother's screaming and reported it to the organizer of the struggle session. My father was allowed to take a break to take my mother to the hospital. On the way, my mother's water broke. Shortly after they arrived at the hospital, my brother came out with sharp and nonstop crying; he must have been “scared.”
Everyone who read my father's memoir couldn't put it down and was moved to tears. My mother, however, didn't read it. The reason was, I figured, revisiting the hardships she went through was too painful, but the best explanation perhaps can only be found in her own sad voice: “I knew everything in the book. I would rather ‘read’ my plants and flowers.” My mother was talking about her hobby––growing her plants and flowers. She treated them like her babies, “reading” them and talking to them every day, her voice gentle and peaceful.
One weekend in October 2011, I heard mother's severe and constant coughing over the phone. The coughing made it hard for her to speak; she managed to come out one word at a time to tell me not to worry about her. Ten months later, she became very ill. I videotaped my mother when I went back to China to see her in the hospital three months before she passed away. She was unaware of the severity of her illness and didn't realize we might not have a chance to see each other again. As a matter of fact, it turned out the day of being videotaped was one of her happiest days in my memory. She enjoyed being my “movie star.” Her big smile, tears of joy, straight talking, and humor were so delightful that I completely forgot she was a patient, a dying patient. She has become my favorite “movie star”––no makeup, no acting––just gray hair, pure eyes, warm face, and joyful voice.
Thinking back on all these memories about my mother, I feel her voice is so vivid that she seems still alive to me. Although I can no longer hear my mother in real life, I look forward to continuing to hear her voice from heaven ......
(Originally written in January 2013, one month after my mother passed away in China)
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