Last weekend, my father came back from Beijing. As a kind of welcome to his coming back, I cleaned his house, hung the duvet and prepared a nice meal for him. Of course, my father was very happy and contented.

You may view what I have done is too natural for a daughter to do, but for me, I just want to make up something. My mother has been checked out to have lung cancer in the summer two years ago. Though she personally had no uncomfortable feeling, her disease has stepped into last stage. It sounded like a bolt from the blue to our family because my mother was still so young (only 60) and looked so healthy. She had just retired form her job for 5 years and had been taking care of my son for two years. Though we have tried various ways to save or prolong my mother’s life, she painfully passed way a year later. Before my mother’s death, my father is a lucky guy who seldom did the housework and never worried about his life; I was a lucky daughter who had my master study in a light heart. Everything became a mess during the period my mother was in her last treatment.

The worst thing for me was that I was also in my most crucial time of study at that time: firstly, I still had 7 courses for master study and was struggling for a difficult Japanese test which decided whether could graduate or not.　Secondly， I had to took care of my son by myself。Thirdly, I had to move my house because the primary school of my son is very close to my parent’s house and my husband and I thought it was easier for us to take care of the ill and the old. I was very tired at that hard time and became easy to get irritated. And coincidently, three months before my mother’s death, I got a chance to go to Europe on a business trip for three weeks.

Now when I looked back, though I have successfully done everything I ever wanted to do (I have finished all the courses required and passed the Japanese test, I have visited five European countries with the students from our universities, and I have moved into a new house), but I had lost so much precious chance to accompany and talk with my mother in her last time. As a caring mother, she always reported only what is good while concealing what is unpleasant and in several months after her chemo-treatment she really looked like she could survive, and I, as a careless daughter, only chose what I like to believe and repeatedly found the excuse for myself not to accompany her for a long time such as I would see her more after this hard period and she would survive as a miracle. But tragically she passed away just as doctors predicted and the survival time is no longer and no shorter, and I lost the chance to see her forever.

My mother’s death brought deep sorrow for my father too and he now always lamenting on his careless attitude to my mother when she was still alive. He was right too because he never shared burden of my mother and got used to the life under the care of my mother and being lazy. But I think nether our regret or lament can call my mother back, she is smiling in the heaven. No matter how luxurious the graveyard or funeral are, she could hear nothing and feel nothing.

So what I could do now is to treat my father better and give him a happy later year in his life. Since I have missed the chance to love my mother more and I must cherish the present to love my father. Time is ruthless and it is mean in waiting for us. We can not put things to tomorrow because our imagined tomorrow maybe never come.