April 20, 2010 is a day I will never forget. On that day, I planned to accompany my wife, who was about to give birth, to the hospital for her last prenatal checkup. Being worried that something unexpected might happen to my mother, I went to my parents' home before leaving and exhorted my mother by saying: "Mom, you will be a grandma in three or five days. Don't ever think about those messy things again." My mother replied with a smile, "I'll listen to you and take good care of myself to recuperate, ready to be a grandma."
Unexpectedly, my mother left us forever four days later on April 24, 2010, when my baby was born.
My mother was a kind woman and also a devout Christian. She attended church gatherings every week to pray for her family so that they could be blessed with safety and peace and cleansed of so-called sins. Although she was uneducated, she was very receptive to new ideas. I don’t know when the deity she believed in was no longer Jesus, the Son of God, but became the “reincarnated Almighty God.” From then on, she began to "study everywhere" and "go out to seek scriptures," leaving neglected everything at home and the crops in the fields.
My father and I all felt that something was wrong with my mother, so we restricted my mother from going out. But she chose to resist us in the face of our opposition. When my father locked the door of our yard from outside, she would smash the door like crazy and even climb a ladder and go over the wall. Initially, she never stayed outside for the night when she went out, but gradually, she would stay outside for as short as a few days or as long as more than half a month each time she left home. Later, she returned from outside only once every three or five months. At this time, our home was just a hotel for my mother, while the “church” became her home instead.
I enlisted in the army in December 2002. By then, my mother had been away from home for two months. She didn't come to see me off even when I boarded the military train. During my service in the army, my father always reassured me that everything was fine at home. In 2007, when I returned home from the army, I learned that my mother had fallen deeper and deeper into the quagmire of the "Almighty God" cult in the past five years, so much so that she was unable to extricate herself from it.
After I got married, I lived separately from my parents. One day, I received a phone call from my younger brother. He said with a crying voice, "Mom is crazy, come here quickly!" When I saw my mother, she told me that she was going to a faraway place to atone for the sins of all the sinners in the world as "Almighty God" had selected her. She said that my father and I were not bad people but were only possessed by Satan. Looking at the clock on the wall, my mother said that the time set by God for her had come, and she asked us to open the door to see her off. When we cried out in fright, she began to laugh; when we stopped crying, she herself began to cry. We had no choice but to send her to the psychiatric hospital for treatment.
After the Spring Festival in 2010, we went to visit my mother in the hospital. She said she wanted to go home as she had recovered and no longer believed in the "Almighty God" cult. Half a month later, we took her back home. My father, younger brother and I took turns to accompany my mother, lest anything should happen to her.
More than two months later on April 20, I was going to accompany my wife, who was about to give birth, for her last prenatal checkup. Before leaving for the hospital, I visited my mother at her home and told her to take good care of herself. While at my mother's home, I met two or three middle-aged women, who were chatting and laughing very congenially. My mother said that they had come to visit her after learning she had been discharged from hospital. I left my mother’s home in a state of anxiety and worry.
When I came back from the hospital in the afternoon, my father said that my mother had gone out again and left a note at home. The note read: "You don't have to worry about me. I'll go to visit your aunt at her home to relieve boredom, and I’ll come back in two or three days. So don't go and look for me, as I'll come back by myself. I'm going to be a grandma, and I'll take good care of my grandchild and never go out again after I come back. "
My daughter was born on April 24. Her birth was witnessed by all our family members, including my father, my younger brother, my wife, and me, except my mother. We had been looking around for our mother, but there had been no news of her.
At the end of September 2010, a villager found a body in a well in the north of the village. The police notified us to go and identify if the body was my mother. My father confirmed it was the body of my mother who had been missing for six months. Although the forensic doctor concluded that my mother had killed himself by “committing suicide," I knew clearly that my mother did so to get rid of the control of the "Almighty God" cult. My mother looked forward to being a grandma enjoying family happiness, but the "Almighty God" cult had taken away her life.
It is 11 years since my mother passed away. The pain brought to us by the "Almighty God" cult hasn’t been alleviated in the least by the passage of time. My father has lost his wife; my brother and I have lost our mother; and my child has lost her grandma. I will devote the rest of my life to fighting to the end against the "Almighty God" cult.
