Funeral

Nothing happened on the first night of the Chinese funeral. My mother and my aunt were burning paper money to my grandmother. As for the others, they were either playing cards or Mahjong. Everything seemed fine. The death of my grandmother was a shock to all of us, especially me. Although she was eighty three years old, she was still very healthy and had not suffer from any lingering illness. I was very sad as my grandmother had taken care of me since I was a kid. My grandmother was a chatty person. She loved to talk. People in the neighborhood knew her as a chatty and lovable person, and would crowd around her to exchange stories. Her sudden death was really a great blow to us especially to my mother who was very close to her.

At that time I was already seventeen years old. The day my grandmother died, my mother could not stop crying. For days after, she still cried. She even fainted several times at the funeral. Not wanting her to suffer a mental breakdown, we decided to let her rest at home. Sometimes, it was better to be away from the funeral and forget about the pain. On the last night of the funeral, we were walking around aimlessly and idling our time away. Suddenly, a gust of strong wind blew across us and it made the hell notes fly all over the place. After a while, the wind stopped. That was when we heard a woman sobbing besides the coffin. At first, we thought the cries came from my mother but we remembered she was at home resting. When we looked around the coffin, there was no one there. For a while, most of us thought that our imaginations were playing tricks on us. We decided to take a break and went for supper.

After supper, my relatives and I crowded together at the side of the funeral, and gossiped. halfway through, we heard the noise of a chair dragging. We turned around and saw a chair moving towards us, on its own. It continued as we stared, stopping finally beside me. At that moment, the silence was almost unbearable. Most of us had turned pale, white as a sheet of paper. All of us sat there like stone pillars and wondered what our next move should be. Then a familiar voice laughter was heard. It was definitely that of my grandmother's. I was even more shocked when the bubbly voice said in Cantonese, 'Why so quiet? Talk some more.'