Tai Ji Men Qigong Academy

If I Saw You In Heaven

Would you know my name?

If I saw you in heaven...

Dear Baby Yu-Ren, this is the last time Mommy folding your clothes, washing your bottles, picking up your toys… I know you wouldn’t want to see Mommy doing all these with tears. I would usually do these with great pleasure. But I can’t help crying this time, just to think that you will never need these things ever again.

I often wonder if I have been dreaming. Why can’t I wake up from this nightmare? Yu-Ren, it’s nursing time; I can feel my breasts swollen with milk yet no one to feed it to. Then I realized that this is not a dream; this has been real. You had been here, then gone. Our predestined relationship as mother and son only lasted for four months!

You have been dear to my heart ever since I was pregnant with you. You often showed your pettishness with tumbles, hiccups, and kicks inside of me. Daddy, Mommy and Brother had been looking forward to your arrival, and you finally came to the world earlier this year. We haven’t had many family outings ever since you were born, nor had we taken many family photos, because we thought there would be plenty of time for us to do all that. Now that I look at the only photographs we have with you, your angelic face reminds me over and over how much I have missed you. Why did this happen to us?

The day was May 25; I was going to take Yu-Ren to the doctor’s for an injection after work. I had my husband contact the nanny to ask her to feed Yu-Ren early. Then I got home and put the pre-pumped breast milk in the refrigerator. I called my husband again for the whereabouts of the insurance card. He answered the phone nervously, ”Yu-Ren was taking a nap lying face down and stopped breathing. He was taken by the paramedics to the hospital. Hurry over!” I thought with palpitation, “How could this happen?” I kept telling myself at the same time, "Yu-Ren is going to be fine! Yu-Ren will get over this just fine! Yu-Ren is the best! Yu-Ren must have heard Mommy’s encouragement!…”

I rushed in the emergency room and saw the nanny sit in a chair with fear and worry. She immediately knelt down before me and begged for forgiveness the moment she saw me. I helped her up and said, "Yu-Ren will be fine! Let’s send positive thoughts to him!” We held each other and watched Yu-Ren lying in bed. The doctor kept putting pressure on his chest, giving him first-aid treatment. His little body was fighting against Death. It hurt my heart so much as time went past second by second. I kept shouting inside, “My darling baby, you can make it! Come on!”

The doctor explained to me, “The child was not breathing and with mydriasis upon arrival at the hospital. He is very likely to be in a vegetative state even if we saved him due to the lack of oxygen to the brain. But we’ll keep trying.” Later, the doctor announced no signs of revival after 45 minutes of first-aid treatment; besides Yu-Ren’s chest ribs were transfigured from the pressure. The doctor then asked me, “Shall we give up?” The words “give up” hurt my heart so much for I knew they meant that my child Yu-Ren was really gone. He will never wake up again even though he was lying there as if he was only taking a nap…

For a long while, I felt as if my heart had followed Yu-Ren away. I would often want to be left alone, didn’t want to be in the crowd, and didn’t want to see others’ eyes that showed their concern to me. I was so afraid of losing anything else…. Then my four-and-half-year-old son kept reminding me, “Mommy, are you thinking about the baby? He’s a little angel in Heaven now. You still have me!” How could I have only minded my own sorrow and forgotten about him?

When other Tai Ji Men dizi tried to encourage and comfort me, I recalled Shifu’s words: “Cherish what you have; let bygones be bygones.” I forgot when I first heard these words, but at that moment they sounded like right next to my ears, “It’s time to let go!”

Later I found out, to my surprise, that I had been calmly facing the nanny without blames or complaints toward her in the process. How had I come to be like this? When some of my family members brought up the carelessness of the nanny and questioned how it happened, I would put myself in her shoes and ask them not to upbraid her. Where did my old self, who used to easily get upset for triviality, go?

After the incident, the prosecutor also asked us if we would like to pursue a lawsuit? My husband said, “It won’t recover anything with a lawsuit.” And I remember when the nanny’s youngest son, who’s only a third, maybe fourth grader, asked me repeatedly with great anxiety, “Yu-Ren is dead. Would you forgive my mother please?” My heart was broken upon hearing it. Now I know how painful it is to lose a dear someone, to have an incomplete home, how could I bear to cause the pain to someone else and make another home incomplete? Blaming someone doesn’t revert the situation. It would cause more damages on top of the nanny’s self-reproach.

I came to know the impermanence in life and learned the importance to seize the moment from Yu-Ren’s death. I also saw my change from practicing qigong and cultivating myself in Tai Ji Men. If I hadn’t been in Tai Ji Men, I would have been living with sorrow and hatred for Yu-Ren’s death, and would have made my family worry about me. Thank you, Yu-Ren, You taught Daddy and Mommy how to seize the moment of life and how to let go with your short life.

I thought of the song “Tears In Heaven,” which was composed by Eric Clapton. He went through mental break-down, drug abuse for the loss of his son, and finally made a comeback to the music stage with this song. The lyrics in the song also reflect my feelings,

Would it be the same?

If I saw you in heaven...

It says in the song, “time can bring you down, time can bend your knee, time can break your heart, time can have you begging please.” In the past, when I heard Shifu’s words: “Forgiving others is forgiving oneself,” I couldn’t understand what they truly meant. Now I have come to realize that the heart can be at ease and free of sorrow only if we let go of enmity and hatred.

Yu-Ren, my child, I am writing this down on the one month anniversary of your death. You have kept me company on every word I wrote. I know you would also wish for all the people with sorrows in the world to let go. Just as it says in the lyrics, “Beyond the door, there’s peace I’m sure. And I know there’ll be no more tears in heaven.”