"It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Today is the sixty-fourth anniversary of my father's birth.
I must confess that my father was a complex figure in my life. We did not understand each other too well while I was growing up, and as the consequence of this persistent misunderstanding, we did not have an easy father-daughter relationship.
I did not understand his life choices. To my eyes, he made a foolish choice after another foolish choice, making his life much more difficult and tragic.
When will he ever stop and turn his life around?
Three years ago, my father went to a doctor, complaining about chest discomfort. This visit ended with him being sent to the hospital. His body was completely ravaged with leukemia and his doctors presented him two choices: undergoing chemo therapy to extend his life for a few more months, alas in great pain, or being medically sedated so he can gently and peacefully decline and eventually his spirit will leave his body within two weeks.
My father chose to live out the reminder of his life in peace.
Three days after he entered the hospital and less than forty-eight hours after I was told of his illness, he left life.
I never said good-bye.
Grief is a funny thing. When my grandfather died of lung cancer when I was ten years old, I was perfectly calm until I saw his cane and then cried uncontrollably for three days straight. After my friend's suicide, I thought about him every day for a full year before I let him go. I missed my ninety-year-old grandmother's vibrant presence after her death, but I was relieved that she finally decided it was time to go.
With my father, grief was something entirely different. It was far stronger than anything I ever experienced. More heart-wrenching. The pain of losing him was so overwhelming that I just wanted to stab my own heart. More powerful. I was helpless--I could not protect myself from this terrible pain. And more beautiful.
The beauty of grief was the most astounding part in losing my father.
For more than a week, I walked around with this strange sensation that I was not in my own body. It was as if someone else took over my body and pushed me to the corner, where I can totally focus on myself. My body was a mere vehicle in which I found myself sitting on the passenger's seat, contemplating the scenery passing before my eyes, while someone else drove for me. Someone talked for me. Someone laughed for me. Someone ate for me. Someone lived for me.
At nights, this person came to me and held me, whispering indiscernible yet phenomenal messages into my mind and warming me with its comfort while I cried myself to sleep. Never before in my life had I feel so reassured, so protected, and so loved by this person who shared the same residence in my body.
A guardian angel? Perhaps. My father's spirit? Could be. God? Possible.
While I do not know how to explain this person's loving co-existence, I do know one thing: I had learned one of the most powerful secrets about life, an inscrutable secret that has been working its magic into my bones for the past three years and will remain with me for all my life.
This person was disclosing this inscrutable secret to me while I began to realize that dead men do tell tales.
After my father's death, my brothers and I went through his possessions. These possessions revealed to me an intellectual man desperate to find peace in life and confronted with the challenge of simultaneously satisfying his own desires and pleasing those he loved. The agony of these challenges led him to turn his life in one big catastrophe.
I realized that his life choices were not the direct result of him being deliberate about wounding us. He had loved us. He did. He tried his best. Each life choice simply delivered its own consequences for him. My father was smart enough to accept the consequences of his life choices and was courageous and hopeful enough to try and to make the best out of these consequences.
I came to understand and to even feel proud of my father's choice of immediately letting go when it was time for him to leave life.
From this person who lived with me while I mourned for my father, I learned that no matter where I go in life, no matter what I have chosen in life, I will be always and forever protected and loved. Bad things will happen, but I will go on. Good things will happen, but I will let go. This person, my eternal friend, will always be with me, infusing me with its wisdom and unconditional love as long as I live.
Life is a mystery that will not be solved within my lifetime. What I can do is, instead of struggling to understand life, to simply live a kind of life that, when I die, I can let go of this life.
This mystical friend's involvement in my grief and my father's bold exit from life healed a part inside me and because of this, I did not regret letting go of my father.
While my father was a complex figure in my life and it was arduous to respect him, he was nevertheless beloved and special to my heart. I had loved him while he was alive and will always love him. I was grateful for him and for his role in teaching me lessons I would never learned on my own.
His courage in making life choices without others' approval allowed me to find the courage to make such choices that may not please some and to also recognize the value in discussing these choices, a value that I often wished that my father had recognized. His determination to steer ahead in spite of his personal pitfalls allowed me to believe in myself more as I move through life and to also recognize the value in accepting full responsibility for my follies, a value that I often wondered if my father had recognized.
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Today is the sixty-fourth anniversary of my father's birth.
I must confess that my father was a complex figure in my life. We did not understand each other too well while I was growing up, and as the consequence of this persistent misunderstanding, we did not have an easy father-daughter relationship.
I did not understand his life choices. To my eyes, he made a foolish choice after another foolish choice, making his life much more difficult and tragic.
When will he ever stop and turn his life around?
Three years ago, my father went to a doctor, complaining about chest discomfort. This visit ended with him being sent to the hospital. His body was completely ravaged with leukemia and his doctors presented him two choices: undergoing chemo therapy to extend his life for a few more months, alas in great pain, or being medically sedated so he can gently and peacefully decline and eventually his spirit will leave his body within two weeks.
My father chose to live out the reminder of his life in peace.
Three days after he entered the hospital and less than forty-eight hours after I was told of his illness, he left life.
I never said good-bye.
Grief is a funny thing. When my grandfather died of lung cancer when I was ten years old, I was perfectly calm until I saw his cane and then cried uncontrollably for three days straight. After my friend's suicide, I thought about him every day for a full year before I let him go. I missed my ninety-year-old grandmother's vibrant presence after her death, but I was relieved that she finally decided it was time to go.
With my father, grief was something entirely different. It was far stronger than anything I ever experienced. More heart-wrenching. The pain of losing him was so overwhelming that I just wanted to stab my own heart. More powerful. I was helpless--I could not protect myself from this terrible pain. And more beautiful.
The beauty of grief was the most astounding part in losing my father.
For more than a week, I walked around with this strange sensation that I was not in my own body. It was as if someone else took over my body and pushed me to the corner, where I can totally focus on myself. My body was a mere vehicle in which I found myself sitting on the passenger's seat, contemplating the scenery passing before my eyes, while someone else drove for me. Someone talked for me. Someone laughed for me. Someone ate for me. Someone lived for me.
At nights, this person came to me and held me, whispering indiscernible yet phenomenal messages into my mind and warming me with its comfort while I cried myself to sleep. Never before in my life had I feel so reassured, so protected, and so loved by this person who shared the same residence in my body.
A guardian angel? Perhaps. My father's spirit? Could be. God? Possible.
While I do not know how to explain this person's loving co-existence, I do know one thing: I had learned one of the most powerful secrets about life, an inscrutable secret that has been working its magic into my bones for the past three years and will remain with me for all my life.
This person was disclosing this inscrutable secret to me while I began to realize that dead men do tell tales.
After my father's death, my brothers and I went through his possessions. These possessions revealed to me an intellectual man desperate to find peace in life and confronted with the challenge of simultaneously satisfying his own desires and pleasing those he loved. The agony of these challenges led him to turn his life in one big catastrophe.
I realized that his life choices were not the direct result of him being deliberate about wounding us. He had loved us. He did. He tried his best. Each life choice simply delivered its own consequences for him. My father was smart enough to accept the consequences of his life choices and was courageous and hopeful enough to try and to make the best out of these consequences.
I came to understand and to even feel proud of my father's choice of immediately letting go when it was time for him to leave life.
From this person who lived with me while I mourned for my father, I learned that no matter where I go in life, no matter what I have chosen in life, I will be always and forever protected and loved. Bad things will happen, but I will go on. Good things will happen, but I will let go. This person, my eternal friend, will always be with me, infusing me with its wisdom and unconditional love as long as I live.
Life is a mystery that will not be solved within my lifetime. What I can do is, instead of struggling to understand life, to simply live a kind of life that, when I die, I can let go of this life.
This mystical friend's involvement in my grief and my father's bold exit from life healed a part inside me and because of this, I did not regret letting go of my father.
While my father was a complex figure in my life and it was arduous to respect him, he was nevertheless beloved and special to my heart. I had loved him while he was alive and will always love him. I was grateful for him and for his role in teaching me lessons I would never learned on my own.
His courage in making life choices without others' approval allowed me to find the courage to make such choices that may not please some and to also recognize the value in discussing these choices, a value that I often wished that my father had recognized. His determination to steer ahead in spite of his personal pitfalls allowed me to believe in myself more as I move through life and to also recognize the value in accepting full responsibility for my follies, a value that I often wondered if my father had recognized.
All in all, his life allowed me to understand the immeasurable value of my own life. My father may not have a good life, but at least he can let go and that's exactly what I want to do with my life.
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