This morning while I was preparing my urgent trip to China, this U盾（USBKey) finally stopped working on me. When I plugged it in my phone for the authentication on transferring money to my US mobile wechat payment account, it went dark for the first time in my six long years’ procession.
The tears once again ran over my face because I read it yet another last sign that mom was fighting so hard to keep herself alive in the last three years to wait for the last proper moment to say goodbye to me.
Because I no longer need this little vital gadget to pay her bills in China any more.
The 9 years over 100 monthly anxiety moment whenever I plugged it in my phone to see whether it was allowing me to pass through the payment or not is forever gone, because in less than two days I will be paying the final bills in person for the last time.
I finally could fly to my hometown with zero quarantine for the first time in three years.
During the pandemic years, I no longer could collect mom’s pensions in person like I used to do before the COVID.
Three years later the amount is accumulated to a small sizable assets.
Now I will collect it for the last time and pass the money to my mom’s nanny Sister Wu, as a token of our deepest gratitude for her 24 by 7 by 350 days by 6 years dedications and tireless loving caring on behalf of mom’s loved ones especially her overseas children.
Yesterday Sis Wu called me and insisted on sending me $1000 Chinese money.
“It’s for your mom! You MUST buy the paper money and burn them for your mom on my behalf, cause I am taking care of other elderly in the hospital and is not allowed to be out. You have to do it asap as she is soon taking off to her next life journey. She needs money for that. I missed her so much!
Once again we both cried over the phone. I love this woman as my sister. She has a heart of gold.
I am preparing the trip to visit my mom one last time. It was always a preparation time full of anxieties- the keys to the apartment, mom’s bank account passwords, social security login passwords, all kinds of notaries, my China bank’s passwords and the China phone and different apps for payment, taxi/hotel/flight booking and payment.
I used to do the drill three or four times a year and now after more that three and half years’ absence, the anxiety deepened.
But it is coming to an end. I am almost done for this lonely sorrow journey of overlooking mom’s last life journey of her time with us.
I am preparing the photo album for mom and I am grateful and simultaneously piercingly painful to see how many more photos I took for her in last nine years compared to the rest of her more vivid and sensible years. In most of these pictures, she smiled sweetly but vaguely towards the lens not sure who I was. But I knew that she felt me as someone very close and dear to her.
I am flying out home soon and my nine year redemption journey is coming to an end.
I am heading to the finale of this soul-wrenching long journey that a few daughters had the privilege to endure as seeing their parents off to the heaven, in a super slow motion way, over a decade and across the oceans and seas.
Mom is finally free.
And my grieving is to be continued to the unforeseeable years in the future.
