I found out via a WeChat call from my mother that her older brother has been diagnosed with late stage cancer in the stomach

& that her other older brother has already boarded the plane from one province in China, to the next, to accompany my uncle to medical meetings with doctors.

His friends, who lacked medical knowledge, were still naïve enough to think that late stage cancer can be cured. NEWS FLASH: LATE STAGE CANCER IN ANY FORM, IN YOUR LATE 60's, IS A DEATH SENTENCE.

"Did my 大舅 (My Mom's Oldest Brother) ask what my 二舅 (My Mom's Second Oldest Brother) wanted? Did he respect his wishes? What if he doesn't want to go through the pain of chemotherapy and radiation?" I angrily accused. I instantly got vivid flashbacks of my maternal grandmother going through cancer treatments at age 70 something, emaciated on the hospital bed, unable to even stand after chemotherapy treatments. By the end of it, she was a thrash bones and skin - I was so uncomfortable at the sight of utter disgust of lack of fat, I had to turn my head way from all the photos.

My maternal grandmother was a beautiful and young woman who got married to my maternal grandfather at the tender age of 19. She was a land owner's youngest daughter in the rural area of a Northwestern province in mainland China. Back then, due to Chairman Mao's psychotic reign, her family's small-owned businesses and wealth were completely confiscated.

It was three generations of hard-earned wealth... Now you let me know how you'd feel if your family's intergenerational, hard-earned, respected wealth gets taken from you...

Her own father got up in the fields to grow the crops, while managing all of the small businesses himself, without hired help for many, many years. (Sometimes I wonder why so many people hate on the rich). All of which wealthy people I've come across actually deserve their hard-earned wealth. It's always the third or fourth generation rich who are ungrateful. My maternal grandmother's whole entire large family of over 16 people, went from being wealthy land owners, to be reduced to living in one dingy headquarter with two rooms. Before, they had more than several acres of land and properties... The drastic change turned my maternal grandmother bitter and stoic for the rest of her life, constantly complaining about how her husband wasn't there for her, how her younger brothers mistreated her, despite her raising them by herself without her parents' help, etc. The complaints about her spouse, my maternal grandfather were so repetitive, my mother and I can still hear it in Mandarin Chinese, 9 years later in a dream sometimes.

"Why can't you pick the rice out of the bowl like that?" shouted my maternal grandmother.

"Why didn't you send a fruit basket to that general's family like I asked you too?! If you had done what was told, we wouldn't be living like this!!!" On and on like a broken record. My maternal grandfather and I silently stood in the living room and listened on like nothing was amiss. I was only 10 years old.

Unfortunately and fortunately, the dreaded spouse and the source of her misery, my maternal grandfather died of cancer before my maternal grandmother. She didn't shed a tear at his funeral. My mother recalled that she watched the flames engulf his dead body in that ceremony, as if she could already foresee her own future within the next 5 years.

Posthumously my maternal grandmother passed of a different type of cancer, just 5 years within her spouse's death (It's a medical fact that old couples die within 5 years of one another, due to grief).

…

I don't know what is sadder.... The fact that my maternal grandfather cared more about the cultural revolution, more so than his own family, or the fact that my maternal grandmother would have had a happier life, knowing that her spouse actually later on fell madly in love with her during the process of their arranged marriage - she gave birth to three good-looking, smart kids (two of my uncles and the youngest one, my mother).

...

I let the iphone8 slip out of my hand as I hung up on WeChat and took a deep sip of that strong black tea. I thought about my own mother's entire life of almost over 57 years... Her own mother, my maternal grandmother emotionally abandoned her when she got married to my father at the age of 26. The reason why is known - in China, in my grandparents' generation, the intergeneration trauma and sexism were deep. How can a woman muster up the love for her husband and her youngest child, when she herself had gone through worse treatments and several political movements that made everyone emotionally dead?

The conclusion my mother and I have drawn from all of this is that: Life is too short to be stuck in the painful past. Had my maternal grandmother been more open-minded, she would have seen that the future looked good, and that she would have had at least 10-15 years of the happy life.

I guess there is romance, in wallowing in your own misery? Maybe it is healthier to be angry for many years, due to what happened to her? I wouldn't know. I am too young.

It's wiser to be happy, or at least try to be happy. Life is for the living, not for the dead. In the meantime, I will tend to my mother's emotional well-being. After all, I only have realistically, 30 Christmas-es with her left, if cancer doesn't get her first.