NOTE: This might seem as a religious post but its not. This is just what happened.
Qing Ming, a Chinese word meaning the festive of visiting your loved ones graves. Every year, according to proper Chinese lunar month, there is this particular day that we can “request” the doorman (doorman of the heaven’s gate) to open the door for our loved ones so that we can provide food, money, and other things to them.
The actual date for Qing Ming is April 5th 2006 (I think), and its a working day. Normally we shift the date earlier to pray for our ancestors because it will be very packed on the actual date, or when the actual date falls into working days. This time around, we had decided to run the ceremony today to better suit our hectic schedule. During the preperation last night, my mom was asking us to handle all the praying task and the responsibilities fell onto my shoulder, as I am the only son in the family. Unfortunately, I didn’t know most of the lingo and all the “proper schedule”. My understanding of “proper praying” is like what I had watched on the TV, running around the table, spitting the Chinese wine on the table to create a blaze, burn the fu (translation: duno how to translate this. It is a yellow piece of parchment and those gifted ones will write on it with red ink and it is suppose to bear some kind of power), and dancing with a wooden sword. So imagine what kind of hard time I was having last night.
Frustrated, my mom decided last night that she won’t be joining us in the morning for the prayer because she wanted to force me to learn so that when she pass-on I will be able to handle it. I mean, doh! She’s still young and why worry about this kind of thing so much?
So I told her that on the day she pass-on, I will convert myself to Christianity so no need to pray already. Of course she glared at me for a few seconds, and then all of us burst into laughter.
Anyway, this morning I had to bear all the responsibilities to run the ceremony as smooth as possible but luckily my sisters do not know much as well, so we ran through it quickly and maybe we had skipped a few things along the way, but who cares? What we believe is that our heart and sincerity is the priority, and those ritual and ceremony methods are secondary. At least I hope if my father still know, he’ll accept that or else I’ll be damned 
When I was standing in front of his urn, I was thinking about the past and the things that happened. Then my sisters were talking about my dad, the things he has done few months prior to his sudden heart-attack, and I was listening carefully. They had the luxury to spend the time with him during his last few months, and I was so far away in the U.S.
And then it striked me like a thunder. I didn’t know I longed to hear about all these things about my dad, the things he has done, even minor ones, and I didn’t know I miss him so much. I do miss him, but I didn’t know I miss him to such an extend that I wished I could turn back the clock and re-do many of the things we had done together when I was a kid.
Unfortunately, he left without a word and today, I still miss him.
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