It is often said that "filial piety comes first", and the best way to be filial is to take good care of and nurture your parents before you die. However, now in the countryside, the meaning of filial piety seems to have changed.
Whether or not you took good care of your parents during their lifetime, their death will become a standard for judging whether you are filial or not. This phenomenon may be difficult to understand in the cities, but it has persisted in the countryside.
Take, for example, what I've experienced recently.
In the middle of last month, my mother's distant uncle died, and according to my mother's Xi, no matter how much a woman marries a ****, her own relative dies, she should go back to mourn.
Therefore, as a relative, I accompanied my mother to the funeral, and the original plan was to have lunch and leave after the condolences, but I did not expect that the funeral was very lively and procedural, and our mother and son stayed in the countryside for seven whole days.
During these seven days, I witnessed firsthand why some people in the countryside complain that they "can afford to live, but cannot afford to die". According to the general funeral Xi of the city, if someone dies today, a day will be chosen, generally not too long, either tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, and then a simple condolence ceremony will be held at the funeral home, inviting nearby relatives and friends, and not forcing everyone to be there.
The condolence ceremony is generally only one morning, three or four hours to end, and then send the ancestors to cremation, the next day after cremation, the family will send the ashes up the mountain, the funeral will be over, no more than five days at most, and will not trouble many relatives and friends.
My cousin died at home on the 11th of last month, but the funeral was different. My cousin did not send him directly to the funeral home, but placed him in the old house of the family for a grand funeral.
He asked someone to decorate the old house, hung paper lanterns, pasted white couplets, and even made paper houses and paper ingots. All of this takes two days to prepare. Then, he invited monks, nuns, troupes, and funeral bands, and the whole funeral lasted five or six days.
It is said that the longer the funeral and the larger the row, the more filial the children will be perceived by relatives and friends. However, this practice also means that it is more expensive, because the custom in the village is that once an old man dies, the whole village must send someone to help, and relatives cannot leave immediately when they come to mourn, and they must wait until the old man is funeral.
Uncle Tang's funeral lasted for 7 days, and there was a group of people every day, about 200 people. There are those who come to help, those who come to mourn, and there are special funeral personnel, but most of them are people from nearby villages who come to eat.
The cousin invited a special chef to charter the table, and the standard of each table was more than 400 meals, and the drinks and cigarettes were arranged by himself, and two packs of cigarettes were issued for each table and each meal, and they were expensive, and they were the same level as when they got married.
In addition, two bottles of wine, two bottles of drinks. A bottle of liquor with a bottle of local liquor, plus apple cider vinegar and cola. In the end, each table is calculated, at least 500 yuan, and a meal is calculated by 20 tables, at least 10,000, and a day is 20,000 yuan, and 7 days are calculated, except for the first and last two days, there are fewer people, and it is at least 140,000 yuan.
This is just for eating, and the people in the village who come to help have to give money, 30 yuan a day for each person, and I don't know how many people will be given money here.
And for the three days of the official funeral, the monks and nuns who were invited, the funeral, and the troupe came as a team, like a team of 20 people invited by my cousin, and it cost more than 50,000 yuan for three days.
During the funeral, there is a need for people to keep vigil all night, and in order to keep the people who play cards, the host family provides a variety of tea, cigarettes, snacks, and porridge at night. When things run out, they need to be replenished in time, otherwise they will be considered stingy, and when people leave, the funeral will be difficult to handle, and they will be criticized.
After the funeral, I asked the chief manager about the income and expenses of my uncle's funeral, and I learned that the income was only 110,000 yuan, but the expenses reached 260,000 yuan, and the main family only paid 150,000 yuan.
Although the conditions of the cousin's family are good, spending 150,000 yuan on the funeral is also a large amount for them, and planting fruit trees only has an income of 50,000 or 60,000 yuan a year, and it takes three years to earn so much money.
When I was a child, I was puzzled by the funeral customs in the countryside. Why can't you just be like a city dweller and keep everything simple?However, my mother told me that in the countryside this custom is irreducible.
With the improvement of living conditions, the scale and pomp of the funeral should be larger, otherwise it will be discussed by the villagers as unfilial. Hearing my mother say this, I feel that the funeral customs in the countryside have changed, and people no longer care about whether the children are filial when the elderly are alive.
As long as the children are willing to spend a lot of money on funeral affairs after the death of the elderly, they are considered to be filial. This absurd situation is widespread in the countryside, where people could not survive before, but now that the living conditions are better, they cannot afford to die.
I hope that this will change soon.