death of a father.

I could not quite recall exactly when it happened but I suppose the dying began in 2003, the year the family started rehabilitating the old lot across the river. Or maybe it was even way before that. Perhaps he began dying when I was still a child.

It took me a while to write the succeeding descriptives to
those lines I wrote having been overtaken by my own metaphoric ability. I wait on the bench under the trees in Jaro Plaza amidst the stench of the piss on the walls of the monuments. Today is a Wednesday. Time for the baby’s shots at the Health Center a spit away.

I strain my eyes to the lines I wrote having to content myself with a piece of stick-on ID I found in my wallet. That one was
meant for the trash but somehow saved itself by hiding amongst the receipt that I couldn’t afford to throw for plans of eventual household accounting. Colorful.
Like the tickets. Concert tickets that remind me of college.

His lifeless body moves across the house; wakes up, bathes, prepares for office, leaves for office and goes back just in time for the news or much later if there are visitors to entertain at the office.

He talks a lot about so many things but the current events is his favorite. He reacts to the news and talk shows on ANC. I’ve listened to all of it for 28 years; those very profound ideas I never thought I could even get to think of when I was a child. Five years ago I gave up. All I do now is give him a blank stare or plain yeses or nos in every conversation he tries to initiate. Those conversations and those arguments are mere repetitions of things already said by somebody else. If he were paid for every plagiarized statement or name he drops, he’d be a billionaire.

It is true. Indeed no matter how much you prepare for doomsday
you still could never be really prepared for it. You could always prepare a
script and trick yourself into believing something else is happening but in the
end you would still have to conquer it all by yourself and completely trust in
what doomsday has to offer you.

When I heard the news, I calmly told myself that such is expected. All men go through some midlife crises and my father does not deserve to be spared from them. He is no superhero after all. He will never be spared. And the thoughts crept into the farthest creases of my mind, kicked aside by plans of traveling and getting nowhere, getting drunk, kissing, hearing an old old favorite song, missing old old friends and eating putannesca or pan de sal ni Paa at dusk in August with the old old friends missed and new acquaintances met.

I remember reading LC’s beautiful letter when we were 17 and recently separated, she having to stay in Iloilo for Fisheries and I, praying to survive Biology and the jungle that surrounds UP Manila. She wrote the letter at the back of Brandon Lee’s The Crowe poster, photocopied on A3 paper. Such a long letter, considering her microscopic handwriting. She writing about her father having lung cancer was all I could remember from that letter, and that she was coping well with life in provincial Miag ao. I was not at all surprise by the lung cancer but was surprised at the timing.
How soon till he dies?
She laughs and tells me to read the letter again.
I didn’t. Of course. I wouldn’t.
She tells me it was just a wish, that she was wishing her father would die of lung cancer. Right now. When we are all 17 and young and naïve and boyfriend less and not yet jaded by life by love by everything.
It took me 3 years to understand what she meant.

News like that however, is also never spared from being talked
about during the Lenten holidays, Christmas or year-end reunions and the annual
family gatherings. First we talk of his inadequacy as a father. Then his
contradicting ideals, his rehashed ideas, his lack of a father figure, his
superiority complex, his sorry state having been very poor and fatherless as a
child. My mother would go on talking about how pitiful my father’s life was. I
get my mind and mouth working up until the talks about his superiority complex
then my thoughts would lock themselves and refuse to accept more thoughts when
my mother and other family members go into their social worker mode and be
empathize with my father. Of course all the talks about him happen in his
absence. He could never take the comments I give. What does he think he is, some
kind of a superhero? No, he could never really take them.

Did I also have a death wish for my father? For so so so so long I have put all those issues aside. For so so so long after recovering from the psychosis of Manila all I wanted was to give myself back something that has long been lost. I just wanted to stop blaming him for my dead dreams. But he never took a moment off to step back and look at what has happened.

Yes he died, at the very same day he began dying.

All the things he said. They never matter now. They would soon be dead deep within me.

20080121.