I read about a father who committed suicide for one of my classes. In the paper, the focus was on his dog, who wasted away and died shortly after his master. And I found a certain discordant irony. A sixty something man has died, but all I am concerned about is his dog. And it led me to think about my father... if he died, would I ever have known what was lost?
I guess that I am forced to answer no. I don't know much about him. I have a few memories of a terribly ferocious person who could lose his grip on everything and lash out at everyone. I have a few, fragile memories in which I felt happy. In which I was happy to be around him, and I really felt like he loved me. I have a great many memories where all I could do was hide myself from him and hope the mask I put on was enough to keep him happy... no matter how depressed it made me.
It's kinda like a tragic story. I wonder if he hadn't had the issues that he does, if he could have been a good father. When my father was my age, did he think he would beat his kids? When my father was my age, did he think he would come to resent and avoid the kids he had? Or did he, like me, hope that one day he could have kids and that he could raise someone that would be able to go on and take on the world? Did he make plans that when he got married, that marriage would end? Did he think that it would turn out this way?
For that matter, what was he like when he was a kid? I don't really know. I know he didn't like science because his father told him evolution was bad. But he enjoyed chemistry. And he got in trouble with an archery teacher for trying to show she was wrong and he was right. And English was his least favorite subject because he could never manage to pass it. I know he set himself on fire once. He gave his kidney to his little brother. He struggled with his mother- and thought she betrayed his father and everyone else. I remember once, trying to tell him that it was wrong to ban your parents from your life. No matter what they do, they are still your parents and you have to honor them and tolerate them, no matter how stupid they get. I guess maybe I wasn't really talking to him. Maybe I was talking to me about him.
I guess I won't have to worry about him committing literal suicide. He wants to be very righteous and good, and when I was depressed and it came out I wanted to commit suicide, he told me I had been possessed by a demon....
But when he dies. I won't know who died. It'll just be this man who was my father that I know almost nothing about.
It's like this tragic story. And I can't bring myself to even try to bridge the gap so that we aren't two strangers looking at one another, knowing nothing about the other. It's partially my fault because I was never brave enough to let him know me, and to let him see I wasn't a woman who could fit into his old religous image. I never did let him know or see me, I just tried to disrupt the flow of things as little as possible. If I died, though he would also cry, he would never know what was lost either.
It's like a tragic story.
 Paras_Serenity · Tue Feb 09, 2010 @ 05:07pm · 0 Comments |
