Chapter 6: A Father’s Last Command

A Father’s Last Command

My older male cousin on my father’s side had that car accident on a rainy late-autumn night. When the truck lost control and crashed into the guardrail, he was taking the girl he had just started dating into the mountains to see the red leaves.

When the hospital called, my eldest paternal uncle was in the yard bringing in corn. The sack in his hands hit the ground with a heavy clang, and corn kernels rolled everywhere.

By the time we reached the emergency building, the doctor was already standing in the corridor. He took off his mask and said, “Prepare yourselves. The intracranial bleeding is very serious. He may not make it through tonight.”

My uncle suddenly grabbed the front of the doctor’s white coat. His knuckles turned white from the force, and his voice shook so badly it barely sounded like words.

“Doctor, I’m begging you. Take this old life of mine if you have to, just don’t let anything happen to my son…”

He squatted in the corridor for the entire night, cigarette butts scattered all over the floor. Toward dawn, he looked up at the hospital ceiling and murmured to himself, “Heaven above, let me go for him. Let me die in my son’s place.”

Early the next morning, my uncle clutched his chest and collapsed in the corridor.

The emergency examination showed an acute heart attack, and he was admitted to a ward on the same floor as my cousin. We all thought that days of anxiety had triggered an old illness. None of us took his wish seriously.

But that very night, my uncle passed away.

When the nurse came to tell us, my eldest aunt collapsed onto the floor. Her crying mixed with the smell of disinfectant in the corridor, making everyone’s heart tremble.

And on the day after my uncle died, news came from the ICU.

All of my cousin’s vital signs had suddenly stabilized, and the bleeding inside his skull had miraculously stopped. During rounds, the doctor looked through the medical records again and again, repeating, “Incredible. Absolutely incredible.”

We did not dare tell my cousin that his father had passed away.

He lay in the ICU, his body full of tubes, knowing nothing about the outside world. It was not until a week later that he woke up. There was still a tracheal tube in his throat, so he could only signal with his eyes.

On the day the tube was removed, he had only just become able to speak. The first thing he did was stare at my eldest aunt and ask, his voice as hoarse as sandpaper scraping, “My dad is gone, isn’t he?”

My aunt’s tears poured out instantly, and she nodded.

My cousin closed his eyes. Two lines of tears slid from the corners of his eyes into his hair.

“I saw him at the gates of death,” he said. “He was standing in a field of white light. He said to me, ‘Dad is going in your place. You must live well.’ Then he turned and walked away. No matter how I called after him, I couldn’t make him come back.”

Only later did we understand.

The wish my uncle had made in the hospital corridor that day had actually come true. He had used his own life in exchange for my cousin’s safety.

On the day of the funeral procession, my cousin had not fully recovered yet. He could only sit in a wheelchair, holding my uncle’s memorial portrait in his arms. The wind swept up the paper money and dropped it onto his knees.

Again and again, he said, “Dad, I’ll live well for you.”

I often think that the deepest love in this world has never been the kind of promise people keep on their lips. It is a father, in a moment of despair, saying, “Let me go in his place.” It is the turn of a back when yin and yang are separated forever. It is the sentence a son hears before the gates of death: “Live well.”

Some farewells are written with a life.

Some reunions can only happen in dreams.

And some love will never disappear. It becomes the wind, becomes the rain, becomes every breath of air around you, telling you:

I have always been here.