November 30th, 2020.
A day my life changed forever. Fucking covid. Fucking cancer. Excuse my French. But I have no more sophisticated ways to describe the two things that tore my father away from me when I was only twenty-seven. The most important man in my life. My foundation in this life. The person who gave me my life, who shaped every single aspect of my personality. Every fibre of my being was influenced by this man, who left this world way too soon. Whose greatest talents I inherited, who passed on his values to me, which I will carry for the rest of my life, and pass them on to my own child one day.
Only from now on, without him.
He was only 61. Sixty-one. Still a big baby. For dying, at least. A deeply, gorgeously, excruciatingly beautiful old soul. Never a big talker. My mother did all the talking, she was the Sun, and the four of us were the planets swirling around her. But my father was the immense universe where all our planets existed. He was the background, the quiet presence in the room. I have no memory of him not being there. He never talked much, but when he did, he had a lot to say, and you’d better pay attention, because something of great value was about to be revealed.
I don’t remember a lot of our conversations from the time I was growing up. I just remember that he was always there. There in the room with us, just listening, occasionally jumping in. He was the safety that never left my space. He was my soft place to fall. He was the embodiment of unconditional love. I do believe that no father ever loved his children more than he loved us. Of course, that’s just me. I know there are amazing dads are out there all over the world. But I’m entitled to my bias. He was the king of the kings for me.
I remember a neighbour kid in our apartment complex started bullying me – he was not the only one – and my father immediately stepped in. My shy, intensely private and reserved father went over to this kid’s apartment, and told him to leave his daughter the fuck alone. I didn’t realize at the time the kind of effort and self-possession it took for him to be able to make that move. But that disgusting bully only said, when he was done with his monologue: what a pathetic man. He is not even really a man. Have you seen my father? He is strong. He is a real man. That little asshole had absolutely no idea what it was that made a real man. He might have been impressed by the physical prowess of his own father, big with bulging muscles, but he would never even come close to the courage it took for my delicate, fragile, caring father to go up there and defend his daughter from a bully. The kid was right. I had seen his father, he could have just touched my father and he would have been crushed. But he had courage, integrity, and such a deep love for his child that he went all against every part of his personality, put himself out there, and did what a real father was supposed to do. Not to beat up the offender. Just face the opponent intelligently, wisely, firmly, and with the most glorious dignity.
My father was an absolute genius. He spoke six languages, a journalist, founded his own newspaper and was very well-respected in our town and community. Until he lost his job in 2006 after the elections, and the new management decided that he was enemy number one, and was one of the first people who got fired under the new administration. He spent the rest of his life either unemployed, or doing jobs that were way below his capabilities, which absolutely crushed his soul. I believe that true happiness left him then and there, he lost his career, his true vocation that he was living for, and it crushed his soul to pieces. I was thirteen, and his unemployment put my family in a huge financial crisis.
And yet, this one I’ll never forget, until the day I die.
I’m already crying as I’m writing this.
I remember us walking down the street, discussing our financial situation in a way that my 13-year-old self would understand. My biggest dream at the time was to learn Italian, and I was seeing a private teacher twice a week. But money got tight after he lost his job, and I was coming to terms with the fact that my Italian classes were also over. And I completely understood, even with my thirteen-year-old brain. While on this walk, I told my father that it was okay. I would just try to learn by myself, maybe I can get along that way too.
The next thing he said changed my life. It changed the way I looked at my father forever. What I saw was pure, the purest of love, greatness, humility, kindness, and selflessness.
This is what he said.
“I would rather starve than letting you let go of your dreams. You will continue your classes, even if I don’t eat for a whole week.”
That was him.
The quiet presence, who could suddenly become very loud when need be. When I was applying for university, I left some of my certificates back home at my parents’ house that I would have needed for enrolment. Two hours later my father was on a train, bringing me my certificates. He jumped on the next train back home, not even stopping for a coffee. He just wanted to make sure I can finish my application, and he spent five hours travelling that day back and forth just for his daughter.
I will not even mention the times I was broke as hell and he would immediately help me out, even though money way always tight at home. He would literally starve before letting me lack anything.
I taught him Italian.
I picked up Italian as a kid, listening to Italian operas and reading and re-reading the librettos in Italian, until finally we found a teacher who could teach me properly. I mastered Italian fairly quickly, and my father – a language genius that he was – also decided to give it a go. I was his teacher. We sat down daily in our parents’ bedroom, on their large bed, and I would teach him Italian until he became more fluent than me. His brain was something out of this world.
He published six books of poetry. He was a true writer. When he couldn’t write his newspaper anymore, he turned to writing books of poetry. The depth of his soul was something out of this world. Part of his legacy lives on in his writings. But not even those poems could capture the indescribable beauty of the soul of this tiny, fragile man.
He got sick very quickly, in October 2020. In the middle of Covid, obviously, which meant we couldn’t even go to see him in the hospital. It started out with a pain in his legs, he could barely stand anymore. The painkillers caused internal bleeding in his stomach for which he was operated immediately. But then the CT scan showed a different picture.
Cancer. All over his body. All the way from his lungs, down to the bones in his legs. There was nothing to be done. No chemo, no radiation, nothing would bring him back to health. Hope was leaving us one day at a time. He had a long road of suffering ahead of him, waiting for cancer to eat his body alive. Then Covid came, and gave him an exit plan. He tested positive on a Tuesday, was transferred to a hospital reserved exclusively to Covid patients. He was running out of oxygen. He fell asleep on Friday, November 27th.
On Sunday my mother was called and asked to come to the hospital to say goodbye. We drove there on Monday evening. She sat next to him, unconscious, but still breathing shallowly. She started talking to him, told him how much we all loved him, named us, each of us kids by name, one by one. And told him that if he needs permission to go, we give him this permission. All the while I was standing outside, looking up wondering which window my dying father was behind, not being allowed to go see him for one last time.
Half an hour later the call came from the hospital. He was gone.
He was waiting for my mother. He was fully aware of her being there, holding his hands, listening to how much we all love him. When he got permission from the love of her life, he left.
I could say to him happy birthday for the last time a few days before, his sixty-first. But because of those fucking protocols, because of fucking Covid, I never got the chance to say goodbye to my father, to the man that raised me, I couldn’t tell him for one last time how insanely I loved him and how thankful I was for the life he had given me and that every single day of me being her daughter was a gift, and will be forever.
But my point is this.
I’m sick of people telling me that grief gets better over time, and just brush it off.
Let me tell you. It doesn’t get easier. And don’t you dare fucking tell me how I’m supposed to grieve. I know all the protocols by now; no crying in public. Not showing too much emotion. And that fucking bureaucracy. All the letters coming, informing me about my deceased father’s belongings and my impending inheritance. I don’t give a fuck about my inheritance. I want my father back. I don’t want his money. I don’t want anything that belonged to him. I just want him, something I will never have, so stop fucking tormenting me with paperwork. I go to the post office to grab my mail informing me about his belongings that are now partly mine. I see the word deceased. Fuck you. And then it hits me again. Right in the middle of the street, in front of the post office. I collapse on a bench and start sobbing. I couldn’t care less what other people think. I sob and sob and sob until I have literally no tears left. He is gone. He is referred to in that document as “the deceased”. Date of birth, date of death. Some money and some share in an apartment. That’s all that’s left of him according to the law.
I have always wondered if you could actually die from a broken heart. Well, I didn’t die. Not all of me. But a part of me will never come alive again.
People keep telling me that time will pass. Things will get easier. The more time passes, the less and less it will hurt. Well, three years have passed, and I feel like I haven’t even started grieving yet. I was so busy making sure that my mother was okay, that I did everything to suppress the storm that was about to break out inside of me. It took me a year and a half to start processing it. Memories and little moments resurface in the most unexpected moments. My father, my dad, my hero is not here anymore and never will be, how dare you tell me to wait for the years to wash away the pain, and who guarantees that it doesn’t also wash away our memories, the only things I will ever have left of him? What am I supposed to do when I’m inundated with the soul-crushing pain that I will never, ever see him again, for the rest of my life? That I had twenty-seven years with him, and that’s it? That he will not be there when I can finally marry my partner, when I have a child, when I finish my master’s degree, or just simply when I want to have one of our hours-long conversations about politics or spirituality?
Don’t tell me that grief gets easier.
Grief is a motherfucker.
And yet, some part of me knows that it does. At some point.
I’m looking forward to the time that when I think about him, there will be a smile on my face before a tear comes. I’m looking forward to feeling his presence in the moments I most need him, even though he hasn’t “visited” me very often in this last year and a half. Although, if I really think about it, I’m not sure I want real communication with him. I don’t want him to come back. I want him to rest in peace.
He had an immensely hard life. He deserves all the peace in the world, and I don’t want to keep asking him to come back just to ease my longing for him. I truly want to believe that he is in a happier place now, where all his earthly demons have left him.
I know that grief is just the price we pay for love.
If I think about it, it’s an incredible honour. Loving someone so much that their loss leaves a hole in your soul that no amount of anything else can fill. I do not believe that grief gets better over time. It just becomes part of your life. It becomes the air that you breathe. Your person is in every breeze that touches your face. The soul of your beloved becomes such an engrained part of you that in a way you become one, you become them, you carry them under your skin and inside your pores, there with every heartbeat.
Honestly, I rarely feel the presence of my father. He comes to me occasionally when I meditate, and it always ends with me sobbing uncontrollably. We are on a beautiful beach at sunrise, and just sit there together. We never talk. He is wearing white, and has the most peaceful look on his face. We have nothing to say to each other. Everything that needed to be said was said when we were together on this earth. Never missed a chance to say I love you. Never missed a chance to say I’m proud of you. There are no regrets, nothing I wish I had said to him but never had the chance to. We knew it all. We don’t need anything else, other than simply sit on that beach next to each other.
He never had a burial or a funeral. He has a little personal altar in my mother’s room back home, with his ashes in a beautiful black urn. Every time I go home, I touch the urn gently, look at his glasses and his watch that are all lined up there on the shelf, and I say a simply hi. I know he is at the right place.
I just have to find my right place in a world that doesn’t have him in it anymore.
And that’s a challenge I will probably work on for the rest of my life.
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