When i lost my dad

Today, I am gonna write something personal about my life. Recently I have experience what might be one of those life changing experience. I have lost my dad for the second time round. The first time was when I was one year old. Just a month after my first birthday my birth father passed away. Of course at that time I was too young to comprehend. Frankly I didn’t even remember my birth father let alone the experience of losing him. The second time round, well it’s harder I guess, parting with my ‘step’ dad, the only dad I have ever known or feel to have.

The day I lost my dad was surreal. It had a dreamlike quality about it. I remember driving home from the office in the usual route, unhurriedly negotiating the traffic thinking it was just a mild case of stomach ache that send my sister to call me and told me to go home. Got home to find everyone had left for the hospital. Again driving calmly even though by this stage I have build a bit of anxiety. Went in to the emergency room, and there he was lying on the stretcher sporting a sleeping face. In fact if not for the white cloth binding his jaw I can swear that he is only sleeping. I stroke his hair and whisper “ Be happy Papa, Be happy Papa.” I kneel down beside him and started praying, I said “ Thank you God for freeing Papa.” I said grace like I’m supposed to, but all the while I keep thinking it’s okay mon, it’s okay it’s all just a dream and as soon I finish praying I would wake up and find that it was just a mere nightmare. But of course, it wasn’t. Instead I found myself driving home to prepare the house for my dad’s last home coming. I remember I was driving in an automated mode and repeating Hail Mary just to keep my mind occupied and warding away my tears. I got home and saw a lot of friends and neighbors in my house already, but I didn’t really see. I just nod and moved around in a zombified manner, clutching to the last threads of hope that soon I will wake up from this silly nightmare.

Now a month after that day I still haven’t quite figure out how I feel about all of this. Like any good Catholic supposed to, I believe that he is happy now in my Lord’s house. My desperately clung naivete thinks that my dad has happily join the big lunch table in my kind of heaven laughing boisterously with all our loved ones who had passed. I have no idea whether this is true or not. But since there is no way to prove it otherwise, I choose to believe that it is true. Because deep down I know that this is the only way I can survive this pain, considering my low threshold of pain.

Yet again, I am mad at him for deserting me. Because by passing away I have once again ‘half orphaned’. Now who will give me away on my wedding day? Who would hold my firstborn in a grandfatherly manner? Who would take my future husband, whoever he is, to have man to man talk. Who would advice me when I am getting my first house. All my life I work to make him proud, and now what good will it be if he is not around anymore. I haven’t even get him ‘the gift’ as my token of appreciation. But more than any of it I simply miss him.

I miss him not in a pining way. I miss him in a softer way, in some sense it’s the same feeling when one fondly reminiscence about happy past. I lovingly miss the way he imparted his knowledge to me. How he taught me about lessons of life. I look back and I can see him in front of the TV, munching chips, and carries conversations about faith, life, work, love. How he will share his wisdom without moving his eyes from the TV. I miss how we would laugh about stupid stuff. Like the way we laugh when we were imagining what if the plane toilet worked like the old train toilet. We would have waste flushed out from the plane swimming in the air before landing in someone’s head. I miss the way he told me about the beauties in the world. How he said that Black Forest is the most beautiful place on earth, and even more so if you go there with your significant other. I miss the way he taught me to do work around the house. The way he gave me step by step instruction when I have to drill a hole in the wall, and how he was pealed with laughter knowing I manage to make the driller stuck even with his real live instructions.

It was also him who taught me that my faith is my way of life, and by faith there should not be anything sad about death. And by that also I will rejoice for my dad’s death, because I love him so much.