remarriage story: My Father’s Remarriage
My father’s remarriage once sparked some criticism from relatives and friends, but I have always supported him for a simple reason: I love him.
My father lost my mother when he was 86, and to this day, I can’t fully understand how he got through those days.
After my mother passed away, I took two months off to stay at home with him. One day, while we were walking in the park, my father said to me, “I want to remarry.” At that moment, my heart felt like it had been struck hard. I knew my father wasn’t consulting me; this was his decision. I had to respect his right and his choice for life.
“Dad, I support you. Whatever you feel is best, you should do.” After saying this, I felt a sense of peace. Loving someone means respecting them first.
However, I was not without doubts. Why was my father so eager to find a companion? I kept looking for answers. Of course, I never doubted his feelings for my mother. On those nights, my father and I often cuddled together, missing the same person, reminiscing about the days she was with us, and lamenting a future without her.
Thinking back on those nights now, I feel warmth despite the sadness, because my father and I had never been so emotionally close.
Once, I asked my father, “Do you want to find a new partner because you are worried about your future?”
“It’s not worry; it’s fear. My fear might be over the top,” he said.
Sighing, he added, “If your mother were still here, there wouldn’t be all this mess.” Is this the answer I found?
In my memory, my father was a strong, happy person who never needed comfort from others. But after my mother left, his world crumbled. The most important part of his life was gone, and this blow caught him off guard. He once wrote in a poem: “Sixty-six years together, this parting is so sudden. I should regret never being taught how to live this life alone.”
Be it a husband or a father, he is a person first. How to live on was the biggest question in his mind then. He was mentally independent and free-thinking, but in daily life, he wasn’t independent; he even refused to be. If this is considered his weakness, so be it. Everyone has flaws, right?
My father eventually got together with my aunt’s classmate, Auntie Xie, whom he approached first. Auntie Xie was 82 that year and had worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, speaking fluent English. She was a very kind person with a broad mind, seeing everything as simple.
They lived harmoniously for four years.
However, adapting to new changes and accepting a new person takes time. In 20XX, when I returned home for a visit, I met Auntie Xie for the first time. Unlike before, when I returned home, I felt there was an unfamiliar person in the house, which was uncomfortable. I didn’t know what to say or not say.
Until one afternoon, after my father woke from a nap, he saw me reading beside him and whispered, “Bring me my hat and cane, and I’ll take you for coffee.”
As soon as we entered the café, I started crying. My thoughts had been complex and chaotic these days. I felt lucky that my father had found a good person, and I felt aggrieved that part of my father belonged to someone unrelated to me. I longed to find the old feeling of home, but I couldn’t bear to see my father without a “woman of the house,” sitting alone every day, with no one to talk to or hand him water.
Before, my father would definitely criticize me for crying, but that day he didn’t.
We talked a lot, from his new life to the days with my mother, until it got dark. My father’s mind was very clear; he was indeed a wise man.
He wasn’t looking for someone like my mother. He said, “No one can replace your mother’s place in my heart, no one.”
He said, “Auntie Xie is very good to me; she has the traditional virtues of a Chinese woman.”
These years, every time I returned to Beijing, my father would quietly tell me, “She (Auntie Xie) is very good to me.”
My father saw himself and others clearly, and he found happiness in his later years.
Thank you for reading! ” Sitestorys “
