I am absolutely terrified. A deep, primal terror that claws at my stomach at night, and puts a lump in my throat until I fall asleep on a pillow drenched in tears I cannot shed in daylight. I try to picture the moment when I find out you are gone (painfully aware that it might come before I get to see you again) and how it would feel to know that there will forever be a you shaped hole in my world and I cannot. I do not need your help or your advice anymore, I do not even need you around… but I desperately need you to be.
I have tried to innoculate myself against this. I have tried to build walls and put distance between us. If anything, it makes it harder in these moments. Knowing I am not there, knowing the distance hurts you more than me, even though you show it less. You are the brave one, you are the one who says it is best for me and you silently accept the sacrifice, like always. I see it in your eyes how much of a toll it takes on you, once a year. In the thinning hair and the deepening creases, in the ever more slumped posture and the way the skin hangs from you. In your weakening will to fight back and soldier on, because none of your kids needs you, so what is really the point of going through each day. But mostly in those eyes that seem empty at times.
And that is when the guilt tears my remaining self control to shreds and I just melt down and sob. Because I know that I will never be able to tell you just how you always meant. Even if I do get to see you again. And there would be so many things to tell and thank for and reminisce about.
I am sorry I yelled. I am sorry you felt so guilty and so useless and so much of a burden and that I did not do anything to soothe those feelings.
And no, though I have jokingly reproached you for it many times over the years, I am not angry at you for wanting a daughter and cursing me with an X chromosome. It was not your choice and not one you would have made if you knew it hurt me.
And yes, I will be forever afraid to swim and your teaching methods did not make it any better, but you tried the way you knew best.
And the time you were laughing at me being terrified to screams and sobs of a cow – I know in your eyes the danger was none and it was supposed to be a lesson. Just like the time you hid behind a car and left me searching for you, thinking I was lost.
And I will be forever fond of blackboards and colored chalk because of the Sundays when you took me to work and let me marvel at all the specimens in the cabinets before being inexorably drawn to the blackboard to produce yet another over-elongated drawing of a horse. And I inevitably made you promise to leave it there until next class and let me know what your students thought of it.
And no, I will never ever try to hammer nails into walls above sockets again, because I can still remember the way you blanched when you saw me. But hey, I know how to handle a hammer and even though grandma was appalled that a girl should know it, I was the one she called to change lightbulbs and fix the fuse when you weren’t around. And she had no choice but to also accept that I had a sculpted walking stick I treated like a bo, a kite, a tube for blowing paper cornets and a real life bow with real life arrows, all made by you.
And a warm summer evening on a terrace, surrounded by vines and flowery smells, when all the grown ups were lazily merry from one too many glasses of wine and I had a winning streak at backgammon against old men (I still cannot tell whether it was the wine, the benevolent surrender to an enthusiastic kid or sheer luck) is still one of my fondest memories ever. As are the hated school mornings when the only good thing about them was the fact that you walked me to school and I had a list of topics of the day that we would go through and you would explain to me everything, from the big bang and rotation of the earth, to electric circuits and marine life.
And my love of books and reading definitely has something to do with the way you read to me, when I was too young to do it myself. And even much later, when I had to read for school books I disliked, and you picked them up and started reading a few chapters aloud until curiosity got the better of me and I read on to find out what happens next. Even though not a reader of fiction yourself, some books will forever be in your voice.
And the times when I was little and lying in my cot in the evenings and crying my lungs out and not wanting to go to sleep unless you held my hand through the bars until you got cramps was the last time I remember ever asking for touch and affection. And you provided. Thank you, dad.
