Why did you do it?
What did I do to deserve all of this?
I remember my father as a good man. A man that tried his best to nurture me into a person full of happiness and love. Yet, I ponder, had he been full of happiness and love as he spent the years being my father?
I wonder if he drew comparisons between my mother and I. It could have been possible that he saw her in me by the way my eyes twinkled at his antics and silly expressions; that he felt her touch in the way I caressed his peach-fuzzed chin as a toddler; that he heard her laugh in mine. Parallel idiosyncrasies that trigger nostalgia in whoever notices.
Do we share the same mannerisms? Do we pronounce certain words the same way? Do our noses scrunch alike when we suppress laughter?
I will never know; I never met her.
I wonder if his ghost is flipping through my memories in search of traces of her. I wonder if I’m flipping through memories to look for the signs of his despair.
Seven years later, I still wonder how long he tried to love me without any anger or regret. How long can a parent go living with the child that, at birth, drew out their lover’s last breath? I am the Grim Reaper that deprived my father of the chance of a long life with the love of his life, mocking him every single day in the wake of his grief with my presence. Imagine such a devastating bargain as this: the birth of his child for the death of his wife. I have spent 7 years picturing the nights he had spent bidding me goodnight and then walking off to his room to resent me for the absence of my mother.
Did he try to distract himself by focusing his attention and all that’s left of his love on me? It was painfully clear he never recovered; an irreparable kind of crack had damaged him inside, and he had been a hollow shell since thenโjust as I have been since he left.
Maybe I do deserve the hell that I have been put through, because the death of my mother only eventually led to the death of my father. I like to think he cared enough to not leave me alone as an infantโor maybe his conscience stopped him from following in pursuit of my mother and leaving his infant son with neither parent.
Did he intend to make me see?ย
Did he know his death would haunt me for the rest of my life?
Maybe that night was his act of rebellion from all the years he had to put up with me. Maybe he did what he did not only as a final testament of his love for his wife, but also to instill in me the fact that I am the cause. I am the Grim Reaper. I am responsible for them both.
By Arjo Lay
