After the Funeral, I Found 99 Letters from My Daughter

An Xiaoya’s life became the greatest rise and fall in her mother’s life.

At 28, she was promoted to section chief ahead of schedule, a source of pride her mother loved to boast about. At 30, she was wrongfully imprisoned. Her father died of liver cancer, and she never even got to see him one last time, becoming a thorn in her mother’s heart that could never be pulled out. After she was released, her mother gave her 400,000 yuan in retirement savings. An Xiaoya lost it all in a failed investment, angering her mother so badly that she suffered a stroke and had to be hospitalized. They cut off contact after that.

A diagnosis of terminal illness started a three-month countdown on her life.

She didn’t cry or make a fuss. She signed up to donate her body, bought an accident insurance policy naming her mother as the beneficiary, and, carrying notes filled with reminders, knocked on her mother’s door again. From tentative, careful overtures to an unspoken closeness, she tucked her unspoken guilt and the filial care she’d never had the chance to show into 99 notes hidden throughout the house.

She kept her illness secret and did everything she could to make up for the past, while her mother, though puzzled, quietly accepted her tenderness. When the truth finally came to light, every barrier between them dissolved into tears and an embrace. This is a farewell lived in the face of death, and a long-overdue reconciliation between mother and daughter. Family bonds cannot wait forever. Don’t let regret become something you’ll regret for the rest of your life.