Some Things I Learned

Fast forward to Sunday, February 4th, 2018 and something super unexpected happened. The Philadelphia Eagles won the super bowl for the first time ever in what was a very exciting game. Oh wait, did you think I was going to mention my father? Well it seems he was staying alive and I hadn’t heard any news of his departure from this realm so I spent the weekend watching Hunter x Hunter and the super bowl.

This morning (it is Monday, February 5th, 2018) I woke up feeling odd. I had some strange dreams that made me feel a little funny and even though I was up until after 2 AM watching anime I was pretty well rested. I caught the bus and metro to work and decided to listen to some Rixton. One strange thing that happened was that as I was headed to work, I kept randomly tearing up. I could not figure out if I was tired or if something was in my eye but I wasn’t sad or anything so I just figured I was really into the music. At around 11:31 AM my mother called me and informed me that my father passed away this morning. Looking back on it, I wonder if the tears were happening around the same time he left this world, subconsciously of course, as I had no way of knowing when he actually passed away. Nonetheless, as I sit here still not having completely figured out how I should feel I wanted to share a few things that I learned dealing with everything I learned about my father over my entire life. At the risk of sounding like a random Caucasian woman writing a list about life that gets shared on Facebook, I shall list some of my thoughts for whoever decides to read this:

1. Life has a way of coming full circle. Even though my father didn’t plan to have me and the circumstances surrounding my conception were despicable, it is worth noting that the beginning of my life was witnessed by him in the hospital as I was being born. After all that has happened, it turns out that the last born child of his was the only child of his who saw him on his death bed. The last images of my father is of him being hooked up to many machines being kept alive in a hospital. The coincidental thing is that with my birth and his last days, neither of us knew the other was in the room watching them. There’s something poetic about that to me.
2. Bitterness doesn’t seem to last. As much as I worked to not have ill will or hatred towards my father, there will always be a part of me that was bitter about the life choices he made. I will never understand why he did the things he did, but what I came to understand was that even though I have bitter parts of me, not one part of me felt happiness knowing he was gone. I knew people who would say things like they will be happy when their absent parent is dead and I thought part of me would be as well but, as I sit here today, there is not a part of me that screams “Yay, he is finally gone!”.
3. There are some things I will simply never know. When I told a couple of my friends what happened, or when my cousin text me about it as well, I noticed that everyone was very apologetic even though they knew about our strained “relationship”. What I am learning is that a relationship between a young man and his father is a very important relationship and those who experienced it growing up realize this importance which is why they feel hurt for me that I may not feel for myself. I tend to think they feel sad for me, not because I lost a parent who I was not close with, but because any possibility of that beautiful relationship is now forever gone.
4. Sometimes what we want to do and what we have to do are conflicting. Listen to me, I did not want to drive to Richmond on Friday night. I didn’t want to go through the weekend wondering when I’d get a call saying my father passed away. You know what though? I knew what I had to do. One of my brothers did not care to go see him, and my other brother said he did not want that to be his last memory of our father. I understand both of their sentiments, I honestly do. I also understand that regardless of what occurred in our lives, the fact is that he was still our father, and as he saw us in, someone should at least be there to see him off. The very nice nurse hugged me and thanked me for coming to spend time with him, my aunt thanked me, and others generally said it was good that I went and I believe that had I not gone, I would have not been forgiving of myself for it later in life.
5. We must choose our words and actions so that we can live peacefully with them. Do you know what was the last thing I said to my father was when I saw him in the hospital a few months ago? I told him to stop drinking water. I never thought that I would be telling my father who dealt with alcoholism to stop drinking water at any point in my life. The reality was that as his liver and kidneys were failing, his body was retaining too much fluid and his legs were swollen very badly. That was the last thing I said to a conscious version of my father. I could’ve confronted him about my conception, I could have asked him why he did what he did in life, but at the end of the day all I could do was encourage him to stop killing himself in any way he could find. When I was leaving the hospital Friday, I tapped him on his shoulder and simply said “Well Wayne, it’s been a life”. That was all I said and I do not know if he as able to hear it and understand it.
6. Closure doesn’t always look like we think it should. Now that my father is no longer here, there are some things I will never get answers to. I will never be able to foster a relationship with him after he gets clean and healthy. I will never be able to curse him out for what I determined to be his shortcomings as a father. I’ll never get the “traditional” sense of closure and I am fine with that. What I was able to get was the ability to exist in this world from a negative situation, be the only child who attempted to make any sort of relationship with my father and his side of the family exist, and be there for him as he was preparing to depart from this life. I somehow feel that this was better than any answer I could have gotten as it feels… I don’t know… complete.

Goodbye father… I learned a lot from you.