Whispering of Willows 47

By Dr. Anna Zhao

It is already half way through autumn. When our clinic is quiet, I sit in front of the window, gazing at the surrounding layers of deep red and light yellow.

A patient came up to us and said, "Actually, the main purpose of my appointment is to chat with you, because I know that you, like me, notice the red leaves flying in the air."

Today, our clinic was only open for half a day. Five minutes before closing, a lady rushed in, asking for our help most earnestly. Dr. Daniel, already doing his routine cleaning, looked at me, giving me a wry smile.

The lady had acute facial paralysis. After the treatment, she said it already felt 80 to 90 percent better. I breathed a sigh of relief as I was ready to leave. It was a very important day. I was going to visit my deceased father at the cemetery. His birthday had just passed, and I was too busy to go visit with him. I knew I must make time today.

The weather was fine when we took the skytrain, but it rained mercilessly as soon as we got out of the station. We were still quite a distance from the cemetery, and we had to go on foot. Sharing a small umbrella, we were soon soaked. My shoes were not rainproof, and I could hear a squishing sound coming from between my toes as I waded through the flooded ground.

This drew my mind back to a scene many years ago. I was only about 6 years old, and my younger brother wanted to share the dried sweet potato I had in my hand. I couldn't break it, so I took out the kitchen knife to cut it. In a flash a large portion of my left index finger fell on the cutting board and immediately blood was running on the counter.

My parents were not at home at the time, and my younger brother was frozen there watching and wailing. I stood still, with a pale face, and fumbled a clean gauze from the drawer, picked up the severed portion of my finger and wrapped the gauze tightly around my hand. Only when this was done, I ran outside, and cried for our neighbour’s help. Thinking about this now, I realize it is not a coincidence that I became a Chinese Medicine practitioner. For all of these years, in extreme circumstances, I had demonstrated the calm and tough side of my character.

As soon as my father came back that day, he piggybacked me to the hospital. It was a stormy day, raining cats and dogs. Burying my face in my father's neck I cried the whole way, and the blood from my hand dyed his shirt red. With a deafening thunderclap, a huge hole opened up in the sky, where torrential rain gushed out and wind whipped the ground, leaving deep holes here and there. I was wearing my father’s raincoat, leaving him without any rainproof gear at all. Every step was a torture; his shoes sometimes sank deeply into the mud, making him need to bend down and pull them out with force.

Thanks to my father, my left index finger was saved, although it still bears a permanent scar.

And today, I held the wet flowers for my father in my left hand to place them neatly on his grave.

My father collected nothing in his life. When he died, I cleaned up his things, realizing that a backpack easily contained all of his belongings. Before a person dies, often people experience so-called Terminal Lucidity. My father also experienced this. A week before he died, he was leaning on his bed, calmly dictating his family story to me, where I sat, keying every word into my computer.

"I have nothing to leave you, “said he apologetically with a smile, “only these wavelets in my river of life, to share with you – events that happened in my life."

Conversely, a friend told me that when his mother was near death, she called all her children over, only to urge them to go collect a debt long owed to her by a friend from many years ago.

When I returned home from the cemetery, soaking my feet in herbal water, suddenly a thought leapt in my mind: When a person lives his life wholeheartedly, loves wholeheartedly, and spends every minute of his life wholeheartedly, then, even if he has accumulated nothing, he is still a rich blessing, isn’t he?