Long holiday

Long holiday As mum was vomiting three, four times this evening, I was watching a touching movie. I should have not continued watching, for the more I watched, the more I cried...

"Long holiday" (長假) the movie is called, and is about a mother from a lower class family with a husband who likes to gamble and a son who is only eight years old. She toils and toils to keep the household running, until one day she starts to nose bleed. Cancer of the liver. Chemo does not help, and the cancer spreads rapidly. She thinks of a way to tell her son, and tells him she's going on holiday, a long holiday...

 My tears flowed incessantly towards the very end. The mother has prepared letters and asked a friend to send the letter every single year on the same day till he's twenty years old... I was so overcome with emotions, emotions which have been building for two months, and which till the other day have not yet been fully released. Now, I cannot even touch mum's frail, bony body without needing to turn and quietly weep, whether inside, or very silently weep with heavy tears....

The mother passes away, and that just made me cry even more. Am I afraid of losing mum, really afraid, more afraid than I realise, now that that day seems to draw ever closer and closer? Is that why I am crying? Or am I just too sensitive and have let the emotions simmer for far too long without having a proper outlet?  I am perhaps lucky, I remember thinking to myself in that final scene when the boy is wandering around the forest calling out: "Mama... Mama... Mama..." with streaks of tears down his cheeks.

I have at least had twenty more years more time with mum, even though much of those years were spent apart...