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Faded Away on the Way to New Life
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As soon as I opened the door, I caught an unusual look on my wife's face, who was lying on the couch as usual. The only difference was that she hasn't hold phone in her hands. She did nothing except lying there with a helpless expression. It was something like puzzlement or agony or both.
"What's wrong with you? If you don't want to make supper, we can dine out."
"Alan passed away." she articulated the three words.
"What?"
"Unbelievable !" I almost screamed at the surprising news.
Just ten days ago, Alan still lived in my home, dreaming to find a handsome job and making a new living in Beijing in the future with her son. As far as I can remember, my wife only has three best friends of whom she has been the first. Alan was brought up in a small town in north China, she was always proud, sensitive, independent and lone. However, life seemed to be a joke for her. In the family, she was not the apple of her parents' eye for their more attention to their son. As such, she was no longer attractive for her husband who ever spent a long time in working elsewhere, where they drifted apart in the long separation. Moreover, she became a layoff from a local SOE long ago, and had to worked in a private company with scanty salary and support her son, a freshman in a famous university.
Facing the miserable life, she finally determined to make a living in Beijing, and turned a new page in her life in the middle age. Babysitter is a reachable and lucrative job in her mind. In the consecutive two months, she worked as a babysitter in four families, taking caring of baby or and adult around the clock. For several times, she texted to my wife, complaining the naughty baby and lazy parents, but she never intended to give it up because it was the only window to enter the new life and world. Till last month, she was luckily hired by a rich family with a less burdensome job. As she made up her mind to devoted to the job, she was seized by miocardial infarction when she rise up in early morning, and died on the way to hospital.
Almost all her friends labeled her life as sad story. As a middle-aged woman's life is composed of low-paid job, irresponsible husband, indifferent parents and depended son, which is doomed to fall into an abyss or marsh. All along, the overwhelming pride spur her to struggle and endeavor to strive in the curse, but ended in failure. Putting ourselves into her shoes, how can we do, how far we go and how long we can endure?
