The Last Time I Saw My Father

Creative Nonfiction

10/28/18 Revision

1,020 Words

 

       The last time I saw my father was the year before he died. I did attend his funeral, but that man in the coffin wasn’t him. At least, I didn’t want to believe he was. He didn't look like my father. A stranger lay there, pale and lifeless.

       He looked old. Like he could’ve been my grandpa. My mom said the autopsy doctor questioned if they made a mistake and somehow the paperwork got confused because this man appeared to be in his mid-sixties, inside and out. I totally agreed. They had to have made a mistake. My father was only forty-eight. He must have been alive, off on one of his work assignments. He probably was playing a game on me to trick me into coming home. I waited and waited for my father to appear. I imagined him opening the front door, in a deep voice saying something like, “I got you!” He didn’t. And the man lay in the coffin, and who knows where his family was. Did they even know he died?

       On the morning of the funeral, the doctor from the neighboring village came over and offered my mom and I sedatives. 

       “I don’t need any,” I protested. “I don’t want my senses numbed so I can’t feel. Give it to my mother. She needs it but not me,” I told him. Her mother just died three months ago and two days later her only brother. I didn’t want to tell him that my father was not dead and I wanted to be sharp in my mind when he suddenly ends this charade of a funeral. I didn’t trust him. I mean, I didn’t trust the doctor. He fondled my breast on an annual exam when I was fourteen and asked me if any secretions of milk come out of them. Why? I wasn’t breastfeeding or sexually active. I didn’t even get my period, yet. But I didn’t say anything more than “No, nothing comes out of them.”

      I sometimes admire my strength to speak up and the outrage I could feel in terms of injustice at an early age, but by my teenage years, my father and his parents had snuffed it out, almost completely. I sometimes wonder what could’ve been. How my life would’ve turned out if I didn’t need to fight that inner voice—the one that said I was not worthy, that I did not matter—and didn’t need to inch my way back to assertiveness. If only it had grown within me since the first time I stated my dislike of unfair treatment and corrected some misstated facts. Since that time, when I stood up to my father and said, “You brought me into this world and should take care of me because I didn’t ask to be born.” No one does. Babies come into the world entitled to be taken care of, fed, cleaned, and cuddled. They instinctively ask for their needs to be met by crying. Then as they grow—and if they encounter people like my father—they slowly begin to understand that nothing is to be given to them freely, that they truly don’t deserve anything. Not even respect. They are nothing and worth nothing, and they could only have a life and a say outside of their father’s house. 

       I absorbed those lessons growing up—the constant put-downs, the threat of violence, verbal, emotional, and on occasion, physical abuse—and it took years to learn to be assertive again, reading countless self-help books and years of counseling. I found mentors who held me up when I was at the verge of falling into letting people walk all over me again.

       A couple of years ago I took a writing class at a nearby college. We had to write three short stories. Fiction. But, I based my stories on my life, real events. 

       “Wow, Veronika’s life seems horrible, a little too much. Why would she forgive her father at the end?” my professor said. So I talked to him after class and revealed my secret. I was Veronika. I forgave because that is what you do when somebody hurts you. 

       My sister and I as children cried helplessly while our father beat our mom. To flee from the fights at night, we joined her hiding high up on the cherry tree, sleeping under the rose bush and within the dried stalks of corn. 

       Yet this man was my father, and you have to love your father, no matter what. You just do. You only have one, and you must find that thing that he has that’s good in him. If you’re lucky, maybe you even find two as I did. Then you can say, “My father was an alcoholic and abused the people closest to him, but he was intelligent and he had integrity.” The two I’s that became so important to me in search for my man. He must possess these, Integrity and Intelligence—yes with capital letters—should never use alcohol to numb emotional pain as my father did, and should keep his hands off me, except for hugging and gentle touching of course—that is always welcomed.

       This is something I teach my sons: You got to find something in your father that you can admire. There’s something good in everyone. 

       The last time I saw my father alive was the day I had left to live in the US. We sat together on my bed and I could see tears in his eyes as he said, “I’m sorry for not being good to you, but I love you.” There were more words, but I can’t recall them all, I just remember the feeling they gave that stayed with me all throughout my life. That my father and I finally built a bridge a father and daughter pair should share. That my father knew he had let me down, but he loved me and wanted me to turn out well despite his lack of skilled parenting. He wished me well and he was proud of whom I’d become.

 

1st Published by Oakton Community College in Spark Literary Journal on May 2nd, 2018.

Published updated version online in Ariel's Dream Literary Journal in May 2020.