A Better Life, and a Farewell | Grandma Kouzi

Speaking of eggs, there are always the so-called “brick-perts” lecturing: eggs are fine, but don’t overdo them – no more than two a day. A food lover who skips meat has long since settled into two eggs a meal. What can you do? Can’t argue with the brick-perts, so I simply switch to duck eggs at lunchtime – I’ve got duck eggs to spare, too.

Those so-called dietary-guideline standards are written for people who sit all day, live on refined carbs, and drown in sugar and fat. The Valley of Villains farmer gets plenty of exercise, does daily manual labour, eats wholesome produce, and cooks simply with little oil and salt – I can eat however I please.

Borrowing Kant’s words, “Freedom is being able to say no to what you don’t want to do.” For me, that means refusing other people’s standards. Refusing to let someone else’s standard be yours – that doesn’t just give you happy, joyful, sunlit days; it keeps you healthy, too.

This isn’t idle talk – I’ve got the evidence. At my last health check-up, the centre had set up a new row of consultation rooms, staffed by retired senior doctors of Chinese medicine who’d been called back. The information-desk girl marched me straight in the moment I collected my results – my age bracket apparently makes me a prime target. Even if there’s no organic lesion on record, there’s neurasthenia, qi and blood deficiency, spleen-and-stomach disharmony, endocrine disorder – surely you’ve got at least a touch of one of those? Cross-ocean high-tech treatments, proprietary Chinese patent medicines, the latest miracle supplements – one of them is bound to suit you, and no one leaves empty-handed. That day I was the exception. After the full inspection, auscultation, inquiry and palpation, the expert slapped my health report and shooed me out: “You eat well, you eliminate, you sleep, you can run – what are you doing causing a scene here?”

How unfair! I’d been practically shoved through the door, and I was trying to assure my cholesterol I hadn’t come to stir up trouble.

II. What People Call Fate Is Simply the Instinct to Fear Death and Crave Life

The one about death was simple: I signed a body donation agreement with the Red Cross. I sign; after that I don’t worry about a thing.

The one about life was trickier. I paid an entry fee and registered for my first half marathon in my life. The fee wasn’t the hard part – the hard part was that from that day on, I had to start practising.

Even trickier: my body was in a wretched state back then – severe depression, a collapsed immune system, and a low-grade fever with a stubborn cough that dragged on for more than two months after a cold.

Life and death are no small things. At the lowest ebb of body and mind, I’d sat with the question – to live, or not to live – seriously. These days I admire Cai Lei; back then I admired Stephen Hawking. But I was certain I could never be as strong as them. If illness had me by the throat, I would have let go, chosen the easier road.

After every treatment failed, I refused every recommendation from both Chinese and Western medicine. I brewed my own herbal remedy, drank it like tea, and ran – coughing, wheezing, running.

I decided I would stop trusting doctors and try healing myself. Running was my last throw of the dice – if it didn’t work, I would end it myself.

Back then, what I feared wasn’t dying – it was living. Living in a hell worse than death.

Before fifty I had never done any systematic exercise. From that birthday I started running – trust yourself before trusting anyone else.

Three months later I finished my first half marathon. I was hooked. Ten years on, I’m still at it.

What I love isn’t running – it’s living well.

III. Fear of Death

Actually, on my fiftieth birthday there was one more thing that was rather difficult: I wanted to use my body donation to open a conversation with my parents about life and death. It never happened. That was my last attempt. They dodge the subject of life and death – I don’t push.

But a person can only avoid the topic of life and death; they cannot avoid life and death itself.

Dad passed at ninety-three, Mum at eighty-eight – both blessed with long lives. My siblings and I took twenty-four-hour shifts for ten years, alternating as carers. Before either of them entered the ICU, they could still walk, feed themselves, and had no pressure ulcers. Without the ICU, you could call it a natural death at a ripe old age. But there is no “if.” Their final days were spent in the ICU – Dad for four days, Mum for forty-four.

By the time they loaded Dad onto the 120 ambulance, he was unresponsive. But his hand still gripped his trouser waistband, which was only pulled up halfway.

At the ICU door, we had to sign a standard-format consent form first, which mentioned among other things that cardiopulmonary resuscitation might break ribs. I wasn’t brave enough – I slipped aside and let my eldest sister sign.

The doctor first told us Dad had suffered brain death and asked us to go handle the paperwork. Then, as we were already searching for our documents, he called us back: cardiopulmonary resuscitation had restored a heartbeat. Dad was now in a persistent vegetative state.

The ICU was already sealed off under strict access controls, and during the pandemic visits were forbidden entirely. Everything had to wait for the doctor’s phone call. The admission form listed my mobile, and every day at the small hours the doctor would ring with a routine update on treatment. On the fourth day, at one in the morning, the call came: the intestinal obstruction hadn’t responded to an enema, there had just been another cardiac arrest, and we needed to discuss with the family whether to continue resuscitation if it happened again.

I said there was no need to discuss it – let him go. I can never forget that hand gripping the trousers. Consciousness was already drifting far away, but the final sting of shame lingered. I feared the promise of “cardiopulmonary resuscitation may cause rib fractures.” I prayed that brain death meant no more pain, that he would not be held hostage by pain.

Mum’s stay in the ICU lasted longer – forty-four days. She was covered in tubes from head to toe: a breathing tube to help her draw air, a nasogastric tube for food and water, a urinary catheter, plus lines for blood sugar, blood pressure, heart rate, and more. She was on eight drugs simultaneously – anti-inflammatory, antifungal, antipyretic, vasopressor, sedative, insulin, cardiac stimulant, diuretic… A person inside an advanced life support system is just a human battery, like those pods in The Matrix.

In this system, being unclothed is the default. Every single garment gets in the way of the procedures. The clothes humans wear for modesty and warmth were never designed for the ICU.

I started to feel grateful for Dad’s brain death. Mum, newly admitted to the ICU, was still conscious, still capable of pain and shame – only a tube in her mouth prevented her from speaking, and the equipment pinning her limbs prevented any response.

I was terrified by that way of dying. Looking back at Foodthink’s history, my previous piece had been nearly eight months ago – the longest I’d ever gone without publishing.

I could still get things done, still do farmwork, still run and swim – but I couldn’t gather my mind to think or write. Page after page on paper, line after line on screen, I’d pile up fragments about my parents’ final days. Countless times I tried to write a piece for my WeChat account, and couldn’t.

IV. Refusing “Not Dying Well”

I had once signed a document stating that she would not go to the ICU, that there would be no aggressive treatment, and that our goal was to ease suffering. The next day, at midday, they inserted a nasogastric tube because she could no longer eat by herself. Standard hospital procedure, we thought – not traumatic, not invasive – so we didn’t object.

It was only after the tubes went in that I understood: within the medical system, external life support is one single apparatus. Once it begins, everything else follows.

After a tube is inserted you must stop it being pulled out, so sedatives are given – a medically induced coma. Under a coma you cannot pass stool, so a urinary catheter goes in. Mum’s oxygen saturation had already been running low and she had been on continuous oxygen. Once she was sedated, a nasal cannula could no longer deliver enough, so a breathing tube was needed – and a breathing tube means the ICU… Every single step had a perfectly sufficient, necessary justification: to save a life. And so Mum, in her advanced old age, was denied a peaceful, natural end surrounded by her family. Instead she was delivered to the ICU – not to die well.

Before the tubes, Mum’s bowel and bladder control had been normal, mostly manageable. The night before the insertion she passed stool three times, all in bed – each movement enormous, yet clearly not diarrhoea. The first two times she was still aware; the third time she barely responded at all. From then on she was rarely lucid.

This was her body sending its farewell signal. When a person is close to death, they stop eating, the body empties itself – that is the organism’s own instinct for life. In those final hours, taking in nothing, the body fills with ketones, and a gentle ease settles over you. I have read many books on near-death experiences, and every one says the same: dying is not painful – there is comfort, a rising toward the light. That feeling must be the last gift life bestows upon us.

Life’s coming and going has its own logic, but hospitals have a logic of saving lives. The advanced life support system inside the ICU blocked that process and confiscated the gift.

The tug-of-war between medical instruments and the laws of nature interrupts life’s natural departure, strips away dignity and autonomy – that is not dying well. I am terrified of that way of dying. Terrified to death.

I want my own going to be smoother. Let me say plainly what I intend to do: sign an Advance Directive, explicitly declaring that I will refuse cardiopulmonary resuscitation, refuse a mechanical ventilator, refuse oesophageal tube feeding, and refuse the ICU.

While I am still lucid, while I can still choose, I will fight for the right to die naturally. All must die. The last freedom of this life is to refuse the way of dying you don’t want – to refuse not to die well.

After Mum died, I stayed scattered and listless for a long time. My laptop was full of fragments, but I never managed a clear, complete expression of it all. Then, a while back, the Valley of Villains turned four, and I set myself a hard deadline: write a four-year anniversary piece, come rain or come shine, or I was not letting myself out of this.

While writing, I accidentally deleted the passages about my parents. I didn’t try to recover them. I chose to see it as fate quietly telling me to let go.

Signing the advance directive was about dying well. But every day before that, I want to earn a life worth living.

I have no wish to endure agonies for the sake of meaning, the way Cai Lei or Stephen Hawking must. But I will put effort into a life that has both meaning and pleasure – happy, joyful, sunlit days. I deserve them.

I who am so greedy for life and fearful of death have all manner of petty, specific longings for the world of the living – a love of good food, for instance. I was told all my life that one mustn’t be “gluttonous and idle,” but now that I feed myself, the goal is more fruit and more minor grains – a full shift from eating a lot to eating well.

The Valley of Villains has gained a few small improvements – touches to beautify daily life and nudge the happiness index up. I’ve been creating a flower border along the water’s edge, and there’s some handwork too, like this reading stand. Boiled yardlong beans are healthy and tasty, but they play havoc with your fingers. A reading stand frees both hands – you can read and shell beans at the same time. Tasty and pretty to look at.

I’ve also bought some fitness equipment and taken up strength training. Not chasing a bodybuilder’s physique – just trying to hold on to my muscle before it slips away. You need muscle to command your own body; without it, no improvement in the quality of life will stick.

Ten years ago, to talk me out of running a marathon, Dad Googled “sudden death while running a marathon” and told me about an 84-year-old American grandma who finished her marathon in the morning and dropped dead in the afternoon.

Mum, who could barely use a computer, chimed in: “So if you don’t run marathons, you’ll be fine.”

I laughed out loud: run in the morning with panache, fly up to the sky in the afternoon – surely that’s a blessing earned over several lifetimes.

Dying like the marathon grandma became, from that day, my life’s ambition. I know full well that relying on yourself beats relying on anyone else. Still, a woman who runs, swims, farms in the sun and reads in the rain, who loves good food and lounging about, can’t help but beg Buddha, Jesus, Allah, the True Lord, the Jade Emperor, Grandma Taishan, every last deity up in the sky – please, protect the life I’ve cultivated across this one span, so that I may create happy, joyful, sunlit days and, in the end, enjoy a natural, clean, swift farewell.

Foodthink contributor

Kouzi

Farmer and endurance walker, village brewmaster. Full-time foodie, part-time farmer, amateur writer.

 

 

 

Unless otherwise noted, all images are provided by the author.

Editor: Xiaodan