Grandpa's death reminds me of why sometimes, delayed gratification is not worth it

The 30-year-old man in the black-and-white photo smiled at me, his happiness at perhaps his first time in Beijing for work still visible more than 60 years after the fact. Yet, moments later, I found myself ripping the beautifully preserved photo in half; the arbitrary split in the brittle paper ran through that very smile, a stark reminder of a sudden but entirely unceremonious goodbye. By the hundredth rip, I had become mechanical, pieces of old photos, alongside scraps of diary entries with neat handwriting and certifications of all kinds, so unemotionally falling into the black garbage bag below. 

It has been mere days since I saw that same man, no longer smiling or 30, laboriously draw his last breath in a local hospital's ICU. I helped put his still-warm body into the body bag little past midnight, and two days later, helped to hoist his entirely stiff body into the casket. I watched that casket turn into ash in the cremation chamber, and lowered the box containing the remains under a freshly carved tombstone. Yet, it was not until I got back to the apartment unit that he spent his last decade of life in, ripping up those photos and papers, that it really hit me that he was gone. 

It wasn't that I suddenly felt that somehow connected with him, for lack of more creative words. That'd be simply untrue. I never learned about the stories behind the photos I ripped up. As I spent years living across the world, I never had the opportunity to hear him out. But frankly, I wouldn't have paid attention anyway. His world would have been too different for me to relate to. I would have been too impatient to understand. And even if I did understand, the realities of China six decades ago would not have been all that relevant. 

Instead, what hit me was just how fragile the concept of life is. Grandpa, in his own way, lived a full life, studied, worked, and played hard, while raising two children and taking care of family members close and far. Yet, as he turned to ash, I found memories of him to fade away just as quickly. A piece of Chinese history personalized into his career as a university professor disappeared with him, as he turns into a set of figures at the end: lived to 95, survived by two children, 50 days of hospitalization... The aftermath of an exciting life is clinical to the point of almost being inhuman, as we, the family members, take a bow and quickly move on with our lives. 

Seeing Grandpa's half-ripped smile in the garbage bag, I can't help but imagine my own last days. All the stories of this blog, all the travel photos on my Facebook account, will just collect dust in a forgotten corner of cyberspace, no longer visited by an ever-thinning rank of friends and family members. At best, they'll become a few more, hopefully productive, data points in future algorithms, feeding into what could be a more human form of AI in the future. Ultimately, all that I have achieved will be valuable just to me and not much beyond.

I haven't felt this way since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Back then, as the world ground to a stop and borders closed, life as a globetrotter felt meaningless. Now, death seems to play the same role as the coronavirus. We can still aim for what we desire, but it lingers as a constant reminder that sometimes, those desires remain futile in the face of the uncompromising reality that meaning is fundamentally limited by our imagination, as well as the apathy of others and the world at large. While doing what we do, we need to constantly justify to ourselves why we do.

It is a thought that I had to face again when I shut the door to Grandpa's apartment for one last time. Now, devoid of all the knick-knacks that accompanied him for decades, it has become just another commodity, ready to be resold as just another secondhand market. The buyers will care little for its past residents, just as I had never cared much for who previously occupied the many apartments I rented across many countries. Even though I thought I was mentally prepared for this rather anticlimactic ending for days, when it did come, I still couldn't help but shake my head at just how empty it all is.

For it was just another reminder that, for most of us, incapable of inventing world-changing technologies or leading world-shaking events, our legacies are really just our own, and no one else's, no matter what family and friends may say. And as we live our day-to-day, earning money, advancing careers, and befriending others, the priority should always remain enjoying the now to the fullest. Grandpa certainly did within the limits of his circumstances, as his photos and diary entries have made clear. For him, that might have been enough.