Grandpa said that the dead also have dignity, and it is their dignity to let them accept the condolences of their relatives with a unique face before their lives and then return to dust and return to dust;

Grandpa said that when you put on makeup for the dead, you have to imagine them as your friends, and although the body is cold after death, it is not that you don't know anything;

Grandpa said that when applying makeup, there should be no mirror around them, otherwise they may not be able to help but get up and see how they look after makeup;

In fact, the three words "grandpa said" became my mantra when I was a child, and then after I went out to school, this mantra was slowly changed, along with the thoughts I missed when I first left my hometown.

My father is a bad man, when he was sixteen years old, he made my mother's belly bigger and conceived me, and then eloped directly with my mother, for this matter, my grandfather's relatives came to the door several times to ask for an explanation, and my grandfather couldn't find my father at that time, but he still gave three times the bride price money of the nearby customs at that time to round this matter.

The water spilled by the married daughter was still relatively patriarchal at that time, and the belly of his own daughter was also big, and no one could find it, so my grandfather pinched his nose and recognized this family business.

There is no banquet, no wedding, not even the liveliness of a grass platform team, and even the two families are clearly in-laws, but they are more like enemies on weekdays.

A year later, I was just half a year old and I was put at the door of my father's house in the middle of the night, my grandmother said that someone knocked on the door in the middle of the night two days ago, but asked who it was, no one responded outside the door, and she didn't dare to open the door alone.

In those two days, my grandfather happened to go on a business trip, a woman in the next county had a difficult birth, a corpse and two lives, the host asked the grandfather to operate, because the road is far away, and there are many things, so the grandfather stayed there for two nights, my grandfather's work is now similar to the "funeral makeup artist", specializing in makeup and dressing for the messenger, of course, wearing a shroud.

On the third day, my grandfather came back, and in the evening there was another knock on the door, and my grandfather opened the door and saw me in the basket.

Grandma said that when grandpa carried me into the house, she asked whose child it was, and grandpa directly said that it was our old Cui family's child, and it couldn't be wrong.

After that, I lived with my grandparents from the age of one to ten;

By the way, my name is Cui Lian, a feminine-sounding name, but when I learned later that my father was going to call me "Cui Yongyuan" (my mother's surname Yuan) to express his unswerving love for my mother, I was satisfied with the name my grandfather gave me, and I was also glad that my grandfather had dredged up the relationship at the beginning and gave me the name "Cui Lian" in the name of "Cui Lian" when he didn't even have any documents, and my father recognized my name.

At first, my parents didn't hear from me, then I started sending letters to my family, and then slowly I started sending money, and the money started to get more and more, and when I was 10 years old, my father and my mother finally came back.

I remember very well that day that my dad came back in a somewhat dilapidated van, and at that time even motorcycles were considered hard objects in the countryside, and of course four-wheeled cars were even more eye-catching.

My father wanted to take me away, but my grandfather didn't let me, and the meeting scene between father and son ten years later was very embarrassing, and my grandfather threw the money that my father had sent back in recent years at his feet, scolding this rebel and rolling with your stinky money.

My father said that he had a good environment and that it was convenient for the children to go to school.

Grandpa was silent.

Eventually, I got into my dad's van and traveled from the countryside in Sichuan to Nanjing, Jiangsu.

People's hearts are flesh and blood, but people's hearts are also fickle, from I left my grandfather to now, nearly nine years, I have not had any contact with my grandfather, now think about this is not a thing, after all, when I was a child, my grandfather was so good to me, so doting, but you require a ten-year-old child to know how to behave and the rules of things, it is indeed too difficult.

At the beginning, after my father eloped with my mother, he went south to Shenzhen, he wanted to get rich, and he wanted to get ahead and come back.

In fact, he did succeed, in the early years, he drove a second-hand black car with a fake license plate from Nanjing all the way to Shenzhen, looking for a local counterfeit seller to buy a batch of inferior industrial potions, and then re-labeled the English brand, and then drove back to Nanjing to resell, at that time it was inconvenient to take a driver's license, and he didn't have a driver's license, so he ran back and forth for a few years bare-chested, and began to run a factory after accumulating a sum of capital, or it is more appropriate to call it a workshop, and slowly until he opened a company in Nanjing, specializing in mobile phone buttons, The factory is quite large.

I went to school in Nanjing for a few years, and then my father sent me to Australia, and my mother came with me.

Even if I occasionally cried for my grandfather when I left my hometown at the beginning, but under my father's sugar-coated shells, the child's heart will always be forgetful, and at the same time, it will always get used to it, especially after going abroad, many things are slowly blurred.

My father was one of those people who firmly believed that "the moon is always round in foreign countries", so I first went to school in Australia, and then he arranged for him to go to school in the United States, and the only impression I had at that time was that there seemed to be a poster hanging in the kitchen of my grandfather's house, with a People's Liberation Army carrying a red flag with the words: Down with American imperialism.

Well, then his grandson finally broke into the interior of the American imperialists.

When I went to college in the United States, I went through the procedures for suspension, probably influenced by the emptiness and decadence of capitalism, and at the age of nineteen I began my own wandering travel, from the United States to Western Europe, in short, my mind was full of self-righteous decadence, and I always felt that the people who slept on the streets with musical instruments were the real high-level people.

Then, I received a message from home:

Grandpa died.

………………

"Lianwa, it's a few miles away, it's almost there." Big Yellow Fang, who was driving, smiled at me and handed me a cigarette, which I took and lit.

Big Yellow Tooth is my uncle's generation, and when I was a child, I liked to run behind my father's buttocks, and later opened a frozen wholesale market in Chengdu with my father's investment.

In fact, from the time I got off the plane in Chengdu and got into Big Yellow Tooth's car, I suddenly found out from Big Yellow Tooth's narrative that my father was not so nostalgic, and many of his peers in the village had defected to him after he got up, and he didn't say a word to help if he could, and even a few uncles from my grandfather's side later went to work in his factory as a small manager.

But my father and my grandfather had a cold war until today, until my grandfather died.

My hometown is on a dam, the original small mountain village, now quite the size of a small county town, almost ten years away from home, and when I returned here, I found that I could not find the slightest memory of the past.

The family's former bungalow has now become a three-story building, but only grandparents live together, and now only grandma lives alone.

When I returned home, some relatives and elders greeted me, but I didn't respond coldly, they said behind my back that they had forgotten about their origins, their grandfather and how much they loved him before.

I knew that my attitude was wrong, but I really couldn't change it for a while, so I just let it go.

Grandpa's body was placed in an ice coffin, placed in the living room, hung with banners outside, and surrounded by couplets on both sides.

Grandma sat in the bedroom, accompanied by a few old women, and I entered the house.

"Grandma."

I shouted "Grandma" smoothly, and then my nose began to sour and my eyes began to redden.

Some things will change, but some things are just hidden and can't even be discovered by themselves, until the moment I saw my grandmother, I really felt:

My grandfather died.

Grandma is not as old as expected, which seems to be the reason why my father made my mother, who was also 16 years old, bigger when he was 16 years old, which can be regarded as shortening the age difference between generations.

"Lian Wa is back, have you eaten?" Grandma took my hand and asked, I didn't see the crying and sadness in my grandmother's eyes that I thought I would see, she seemed calm.

"Eat."

"Hmm." Grandma sat back down, and she talked to me, and I coped.

Only then did I find out that Grandma was tying paper people.

Grandpa's profession is to make up for the dead, and sometimes he helps to handle white things, and grandma is specialized in paper people to sell, so they are not short of money, and now I know that these three-story buildings are definitely not built by them with the money given by my father, I think grandpa chose to build such a big house to tell his son that I can live well without your stinky money old man.

This reminds me of when my father abducted my mother and eloped, my grandfather directly took out three times the bride price to my grandfather, this line of work, does make money, whether it is ten years ago, or ten years later, because no matter how the times change, how the society develops,

People always have to die.

Grandma tied a paper figure, I saw that it was a housekeeper, and then she sighed: "Your grandma, I can still give your grandpa a few people to burn to the ground to serve, but your grandpa has been putting on makeup for the dead all his life, and when he leaves, he can't make up himself." ”

After Grandma sighed, she said directly to a few old women around her: "I have something to say to Lianwa." ”

A few old women seemed to be in awe of Grandma, and immediately got up and left the room, leaving me and Grandma in the room.

Grandma got up, walked to the cabinet next to the bed, and took out a wooden box with a belt on top of it.

I remember this box, when I was a child, my grandfather would carry this box out every time he went out to put on makeup on the dead, and this box was like a small box after selling a bicycle for my grandfather, a guy who eats.

"Lianwa, your grandfather doesn't know what kind of madness he smoked before he died, he said that he wanted you to put on his makeup, and he said that he wanted his grandson to put on his makeup and send him on the road."

When I heard this, I was stunned, and I knew that I must have clearly shown "embarrassment" on my face at that time;

Yes, even if that person was my grandfather, he was very kind and doting on me when I was a child, but I really couldn't accept it when I suddenly went to put makeup on a dead man, which may be very perverse and not a thing, but that's what I thought at the time.

Grandma must have seen my resistance, sighed, put the box next to the bed, and walked out first, leaving a sentence:

"Don't pay attention to your grandfather, he was not sober before he died, Lianwa, you are a person who has drunk foreign ink, how can you run this business like him."

I was left alone in the room, and I walked to the bed, and opened the box, which bore traces of time, and contained makeup pens and other objects that resembled the makeup of women today, but I felt terrified at the thought that these things had put makeup on an unknown number of dead people.

In my memory when I was a child, every time my grandfather went out with this wooden box on his back, when he came back, he would always bring me a lot of delicious food, after all, the funeral master would definitely stay at the table, and the grandfather would tear off a piece of plastic paper on the table to wrap some hard dishes or snacks for his grandson who couldn't eat on weekdays and bring them back, so every time I saw my grandfather carrying this box out of the house, I was very happy, looking forward to grandpa coming back in the evening to bring me delicious food.

Now, I'm reluctant to touch the box.

However, there are not only makeup things in the box, but also a separate small grid, which contains a copper seal, and I don't want to touch the makeup things for the time being, but I picked up this copper seal, and the copper seal is engraved with eight seal characters:

"Heavenly officials bless, there are no taboos."