With no one to assist, the daughter completed her father's funeral alone
My father died at the age of 75 due to a sudden cerebral hemorrhage, and as an only child, I didn't feel too much sadness.
The old man is in his prime, and I don't feel much pain about it.
He did not experience a long period of illness, and his death was considered a blessing.
I have seen too many elderly people who are plagued by illness, and while struggling to get through the last days, I feel unspeakable pain.
After my mother passed away five years ago, I took my father to the city and enjoyed the local scenery and food.
After graduating, I did my best to support my parents, thinking that I had achieved filial piety and had no regrets.
But how to deal with his father's funeral has become a problem.
Due to the single family lineage, there are not many relatives, which makes me embarrassed.
My father sighed and said that it was destined to leave me, a daughter, who was unable to handle the funeral.
When my mother died, I had relatives to help, but now I am the only daughter left.
Although husbands and sons can help, it is inevitable that people with foreign surnames will not be able to play a role.
They suggested burying on the outskirts of the city to simplify the procedure, but I didn't think it was ethical.
They also proposed to bury my grandmother and grandfather together, but I felt that it was against their wishes.
Although his father has no male heirs, he has always actively participated in the family's happy events and funeral activities, and has given countless gifts.
He taught me that accumulating favors is for the convenience of old age.
Although I was alone, I trusted my father's past connections and thought it would be okay to bury him.
However, when it came time to bury him, he encountered a shortage of manpower.
The sixth uncle told me that since most of the young people are now working outside the home, there are only elderly people at home, and it is difficult to find people to help.
He suggested simplifying the funeral, buying only the coffin, and contacting relatives and friends who were out to come back to help.
Of course, I hope to send my father to the soil in the simplest way, but this is the most appropriate thing to say from the mouth of the sixth uncle.
Therefore, I looked at the sixth uncle gratefully and nodded in thanks.
The next day, only a few old people in the clan who were close to my father came to my father's spirit with crutches, wiping their tears and sighing, lamenting the shortness of life and the impermanence of life.
And burned some paper money to mourn.
I quickly knelt down to thank and greet the salute, and comforted a few old people to take their seats.
Seeing that the sky was already dark, there was not a single figure in the clan who had returned.
The sixth uncle, who is well versed in the rural people's sophistication, knows that we have no follow-up to the desperate family, and it is impossible for all the people outside the clan to come back to help this favor, and according to my father's many years of conduct, it is no problem for at least one or twenty people from the clan who work in the county and city to come back.
Unexpectedly, such a concerted one has not arrived, and in addition to being unexpected, the sixth uncle is also a little impatient and restless about such a result, because tomorrow is the third day, and no one in the clan will come back, how can this funeral come out? He contacted an excavator that night to prepare for tomorrow's grave digging.
In the local area, after digging the grave pit, a rectangular tomb more than two meters long and about one meter wide is built with bricks, and the coffin containing the urn goes down to the finished tomb, and the surface is covered with several cement covers, and then covered with cement, and the grave is filled with soil, and the grave is completed.
The person in charge of building the tomb is also responsible for transporting the coffin of the deceased to the cemetery.
It sounds very cumbersome, but in fact it is very simple, the tomb only needs three or four hundred bricks, one or two bags of cement are enough, and the coffin is now very light and thin.
This kind of work is usually done by four people and five people, but it is necessary to have two or three bricklayers to do it.
Now that the people in the clan can't point to it, the sixth uncle, who has a wide range of contacts, can talk about it and hire a rural construction team in the neighboring village.
Because, they really don't want to do this kind of errand, and they feel a little unlucky.
Fortunately, it is still easy to talk with money, and in the end I agreed to the five of them, each of whom was paid 1,000 yuan, and finally spent 5,000 yuan to solve this problem.
The result of my ** funeral report was: the three old relatives of the family were all rejected by them for various reasons to attend my father's funeral.
The sixth uncle, who has been the head of weddings and funerals for most of his life, exclaimed that this was something that had never happened in the past.
He pondered for a long time and further analyzed: These people, knowing that your father is gone, this family will be cut off, and the gift money they paid will be lost, and their family will encounter a funeral, and there will be no one here to pay the gift money, because the family has been cut off.
Is this a relative? Is this still related to them? I asked indignantly.
To be honest, although I am happy to see such a result, because I save the cumbersome of hosting a banquet and entertaining guests, but I feel that they are really not kind, last year, I also accompanied my father to a cousin funeral, and paid a gift of 400 yuan, the year before last, another relative's cousin died, my father is also 400 yuan of etiquette, you come to pay a penny, our family lacks people, I am also grateful to help a person.
When someone dies here, the clan and even the whole village will present a piece of paper and some money to the deceased's family on the day of the funeral, as a way to mourn the deceased and comfort the deceased's family.
Hold the bamboo pole"The person (called the Remembrance Account) recorded the paper and amount of money given by each person in the book, so that he could return it to the Lord later.
The cover of the notebook is written in a brush"Etiquette is still coming"There are four big characters, and below them are small blocks of a certain year, a certain month, and a certain day in Common Era.
The format of the record is from left to right: so-and-so sacrificial ceremony so-and-so yuan, paper yuan knife.
With the development of the economy, the number of rituals has grown from a few corners and a few tens of yuan to 1,200 today, and there are still tens of thousands of people who have special friendships.
My father has never been absent from such a thing, and for more than a decade the rituals have never been less than a hundred dollars.
In the past few years, all kinds of channels have learned about the deceased in the village, and he has asked me to transfer money to others, but more importantly, we have never received the news of the death of the villager, so it has been missed.
This irremediable thing often left the father feeling regret and apology.
On the day of the funeral, because there were no relatives coming, and there were no people in the clan who were busy coming and going, only the excavators dug up the empty tomb, and the hired workers were building the tomb, and there was less of the meaningless red tape, less noise and noise, and only the three members of my family were quietly guarding in front of my father's spirit.
Since there were no complicated things, the sixth uncle, the chief administrator, acted as Mr. Ledger, but until noon, he did not see a single member of the clan who came to help, let alone a penny of money, and only a few knives and papers were sent to a few old men, which was considered to be paid for official business.
The sixth uncle said: In the past, there were people in the clan who couldn't come back to help because of special things, but they all transferred money to him and asked him to perform the ritual on his behalf, but today they are penniless.
As for the reason, there is no need to go deeper, the clansmen and my relatives are of the same opinion, and they feel that no matter how my father treated them before, as soon as he died, the family will be cut off, and they will come to the house to help with the funeral at their expense, and they will also have to pay the money, and the money will naturally belong to me, a daughter who is married far away.
They will not be blind with this money, and they will never come back.
If you think about it carefully, there is nothing wrong with them doing a good job like this, the peasants are pragmatic, they cannot afford to be unprofitable, they rely on physical strength to eat, and there is really no need and even more reluctance to do some things that have not been returned.
Their pattern and perception doom the rationality of their approach.
But they were so heart-to-heart on this matter, so consistent, and so heart-to-heart, which made me a little shocked.
Actually, I don't care about these gifts, my husband and I have a micro-business, and we are still free economically, I thought that the money I received at my father's funeral, I would double it through the sixth uncle and the ** person in charge of the sixth uncle in the future.
The villagers did this to save me the trouble and eliminate the guilt I felt for them.
I feel my father's sorrow chiefly if he had knowledge under the fountain.
Several workers pulled my father's coffin with a row of cars, I followed silently with my husband and son, I did not shed tears, not even sadness, I felt that birth, old age, sickness and death are the laws of nature, I thought I was a filial daughter, worthy of my parents, my father went without illness and pain, it was lucky, it was the result of his virtuous cultivation, my heart was very comforting.
Through my father's funeral, I truly understood why my father and his fathers gave birth to a son at the expense of their poor family.
The reason why my father, who lives better than at least 90% of the old people in the village, but he has never been happy, is because he is out of house without a son, and this frustration and inferiority complex have entangled him all his life.
The same is true from a secular point of view, if he had a son, my father's funeral would not have been like this, and if I were my father's son and not his daughter, my father's funeral would have been magnificent and unprecedented.
But when you think about it, what's the use of that? People die like lights go out, no matter how brilliant your life is, who will remember you decades after your death, it is just a grain of dust of history.