Three Obituaries—The Greatest Gift of Heaven and Earth Is Not Letting You Live, but Letting You Have Lived
Translated by AI. Read the Chinese original ↗
Contents 4 sections
I. Huaiyang, 223 BCE
In autumn of the twenty-fourth year of King Zheng of Qin, Qin armies launched a major attack on Chu. Conscription orders reached every county.
Two men out of three, three out of five; all able to wield a spear joined the ranks.
He had served two years.
The previous year he transported supplies behind the lines. This autumn he finally joined the vanguard. He was happy.
The vanguard meant scaling walls first; that meant military merit; merit meant land.
He thought far ahead, and very close: far enough to plan how many rooms to build after the war, close enough to want only to survive this battle.
He spent three days sharpening his ring-pommel sword.
Old, with a chipped edge. He pushed it over the whetstone again and again, until it reflected a face.
At night he practiced gripping it: left hand forward, right behind, thumb-web tight, elbows not turned out.
The veteran in the next bed rolled over, muttered “sleep,” and received no answer. He kept practicing.
He spent another two hours tying his straw shoes.
Newly issued, stiff hemp cords. Afraid they would chafe while marching, he untied and retied the knots four or five times, until just right.
He folded clothes and armor neatly beside his pillow, like clothes for a banquet.
He also wrote a letter.
A few lines carved on bamboo, roughly: Your son is in Huaiyang, well. Is home well? If there is spare money, send quickly. Urgent, urgent, urgent.
He entrusted it to a veteran from his hometown, to bring to the county when he had time.
Dawn.
The horn sounded three times.
He dressed, tied his shoes, took his sword, left camp.
In formation, he stood in the third row.
Shield soldiers raised their shields ahead. He could not see forward.
Something came from somewhere.
Perhaps an arrow, a spear, perhaps nothing at all. He fell.
He never even saw the enemy.
Two thousand one hundred and ninety-eight years later, in winter 1975, at Shuihudi in Yunmeng, Hubei, archaeologists unearthed two bamboo family letters from a Qin tomb.
Their writers, Heifu and Jing, were ordinary soldiers in Qin’s attack on Chu.
The letter said:
“If the household sends nothing, I shall die. Urgent, urgent, urgent.”
(If money does not come from home, I will die.)
They are China’s earliest surviving physical family letters.
The writers became dust long ago. Those few lines remained.
II. Braunau, September 28, 1567
On the night of September 28, 1567, the old town of Braunau, Austria, by the Inn River caught fire.
Mayor Hans Steininger was at home.
Mayor for six terms, known by everyone—not for remarkable achievements, but for his beard reaching his feet.
He had grown it for over twenty years. Each morning he first washed and combed it, root to tip with an ivory comb, then coiled it carefully into a sewn leather pouch at his waist.
He treasured it.
When young, it reached only his chest. His wife complained it got in the way, dipping into soup.
Later he learned to coil it. No more complaints.
One year, reporting in Vienna, he needed two attendants to carry it.
The emperor was delighted by the sight and granted several commercial-tax exemptions.
From then on, the beard was more than a beard: his medal, emblem, the whole reason he was “Mayor Steininger.”
When fire broke out, he was upstairs.
Smoke rose from below. He jumped from bed, threw on a coat, rushed instinctively to the door.
Through the corridor, toward the stairs. He had forgotten to put away his beard.
He stepped on it.
Or it caught his foot.
Either way, he tumbled downstairs, landed on the back of his head, broke his neck.
Later town records contained only:
“Mayor Steininger died after accidentally falling down stairs while escaping a fire.”
No mention of the beard.
The townspeople later erected a stone statue.
His ivory comb, leather pouch, and coiled beard remain in Braunau’s Herzogsburg Museum, more than four hundred and fifty years later.
The beard remains. The man does not.
III. South Carolina, 1989
1989, Central Correctional Institution, South Carolina, United States.
Michael Godwin, twenty-eight, imprisoned for murder.
Originally sentenced to death by electric chair.
A successful appeal changed it to life imprisonment.
He considered himself lucky: a small cell, but alive.
He earned two university degrees in prison, sociology and psychology.
Guards said he behaved well, never caused trouble.
His only pastime was fixing things.
Radios, fans, lamps: anyone whose belongings broke came to him.
He thought working with his hands brought peace.
That day, he repaired an old television’s headphone wire.
A loose end; he needed to test the circuit.
He held one end in his mouth. Using his mouth when hands were not enough was an old habit.
He sat on a metal toilet, the cell’s only stable chair.
He switched on the power.
A guard on routine rounds found him dead.
Severe burns to mouth and tongue.
The investigation used many terms: short circuit, poor grounding, damp conditions, bodily resistance.
It was simple: a live wire in his mouth, his body on conducting metal.
The law removed the electric chair for him, but he did not escape the power fate quietly switched on.
A prison spokesman said:
“It was a strange accident.”
The television still worked.
Another prisoner moved it, changed the channel, heard music.
Afterword
The Book of Changes says:
The great virtue of heaven and earth is giving life.
Young, I thought little of it. Life is life; why praise it?
Later I read Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene:
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.
(Being eligible to die means you were granted existence.)
One saying from pre-Qin bamboo texts, another from the contemporary West: ancient and modern, East and West, echoing across distance, speaking of one thing:
The greatest gift of heaven and earth is not letting you live, but letting you have lived.