Translated…
After I’d finished up with work in Taipei, I’d often gone to my mother-in-law’s ancestral home to visit her. Twenty years ago, my father-in-law, in a morning when it was a cold front, on the way to check his planting fields, he had a myocardial infarction and died, back then, the woman who’d cried her eyes out, she’s at ninety years of age, and still goes to her field every single day.
In the mornings, my mother-in-law would go and make the rounds at her field, and, for several days, she’d gone to the functions of the community, in the noon hours, she’d come home, to take her naps, and, in the evenings, she’d gone out to her vegetable plantation to water and watch over her planted goods, her days passed by very simply. At the beginning when my father-in-law just passed on, my mother-in-law moved in with us for two years, but, because she disliked the hard concrete apartments, so, she’d still gone back to the home that she and my father-in-law shared, and kept a few stray cats for company.
One day, as my husband and I was about to take my mother-in-law to go to her doctor’s appointment, as my husband started the engine, we saw another white-haired lady walking toward us, it was my mother-in-law’s good friend and neighbor, Auntie Uhr, she’d brought along a cabbage, wanted to give it to my mother-in-law. The two of them said their hellos through the car window, as they parted ways, from the corners of both their lips, I caught that smile of care and concern.
When I saw this scene, I was very moved. This sort of a special close connection seemed to be exactly what I’d lacked, what sort of a selfless giving, can get you the lifetime of shared concerns? Busying at work, tensed up nerves, as well as the heaviness of the economic burdens had caused me to lose my friends, lost my fun, even, the heart to feel moved by things, and now, on the faces of these two elderly, I saw the radiance, and the true meaning of friendship.
This still just shows, how important socialization IS, especially in the elderly years, and, you can see how the mother-in-law here refused to move to the city with her son and daughter-in-law, because she has set up a stable life for herself already, she already has a set-up social network, and, to remove her from that, it would be too cruel, and besides, this elderly is way too independent, to want or need to rely on her kids.
