Not My Kind of Reunion
It doesn’t have to take a death for a family and all its relatives to be under one roof again. Sadly, a feeling appended much more by my grandmother’s death, some people don’t think among the same lines as I.
It was 2 Saturdays ago when the funeral took place. Chinese funeral ceremonies are way different to Western ones, in terms of etiquettes, rituals, as well as length. Western funerals are as short as just one morning (I’m talking about the burial/cremation, not the one where the corpse are placed on a mortuary). Chinese funerals, on the other hand, can last for days. Thankfully, this one only lasted 1 whole day.
Now, I’m not going to start acting all morose again in speaking about my late grandmother, because I think I’ve done that enough times for the past few weeks. What I find slightly interesting is how only this kind of event expedited a reunion that seemed to take forever to come.
I mean, yeah, it was heartwarming to be together with all of my siblings and at the same time my parents after being separated individually for 4 years. It was also cool to have seen cousins who are sons and daughters of my 2nd and 3rd uncle (my dad’s the eldest, so I don’t have a 1st uncle) after not seeing them for a decade. It was also nice to see cousins from my 4th and 5th uncle for the first time (with the exception of one basketball fanatic of a cousin. And funny thing is, that cousin’s a girl.) But the question I truly want to ask is:
Why does it have to take someone’s death in order for everyone to be gathered around one place? Why did it not happen earlier when my grandmother was still alive?
