No title...

My father is gone!

August 11, 2012 signaled the end of life as I have known it for the past nine years.  I look at my parents’ picture and feel at peace that both are together in heaven smiling down at us. But then I wish I could grab them both out of the picture and pretend they’re still here.

I’ve been at peace with my mother’s loss for quite sometime. But the minute my father took his last breath, all the painful memories were awakened within a fraction of a second. I felt double the pain and double the agony. I felt my heart stopped beating and I wished God would take me with him. I was holding his hand, trying to keep it warm and whispered in his ears that it was ok to go, but deep inside I was aching for him to stay.  I was screaming inside.

I kept taking mental pictures of every second with him.  The last few hours are so clear in my head, every breath, every prayer and even every teardrop.

I thought the separation would be easier but it was much more painful than I have ever imagined. It felt like someone has taken my baby away from me! I swear for a moment I felt like a mother mourning the loss of her child. I could feel the pain in my heart like someone has just stabbed me.

I had been mourning my father for at least five years and I thought I’d cried all the tears but it turned out that I haven’t. 

I look around the house and take occasional glimpses of his empty bedroom and think ‘how on earth am I supposed to move on?’ Life can’t go on without him.  He can’t just be another portrait on the wall! But he is now and will always be.

It was less than a month ago when I sat at his bedside, held his hand and thought this moment will soon be a memory. I remember crying in silence because I was worried he’d sense my anxiety.  I don’t know how many times I kissed his hands and thanked him in my heart for being the best father anybody could ask for. 

Even throughout the hardest times of his illness, when roles were switched and he was the child, he still managed to express fatherly love.

I keep getting flashbacks of the times when he’d be looking at me with love in his eyes, and despite the fact that he’d forgotten all the words, he still remembered how to say “my love, my soul, my heart”!

Those are the moments that will forever be engraved in my memory.

I still don’t know how the new chapter of my life would look like.

But I do know that life without them will never be the same.

Double the love

(This post was written on May 17 and I never got to finish it. But I just decided to post it anyway)

I’ve been having negative thoughts lately…a bad feeling in my gut and heaviness in my heart.

The thought of losing my father has always been part of our daily lives ever since he was diagnosed with brain tumor nine years ago. But when this thought started to take shape in the past week into a close possibility, it erased every single moment we’ve lived with the illness! It felt like he was just diagnosed.

Everything came back…the same fear, the anxiety, and the memories of the most difficult moments we had when we first found out about my parents’ illness all rushed back.

Until last week, I felt things were relatively under control. I don’t know what happened a few days ago, a strange feeling of an urgent attachment to my father took over.

I suddenly had a gut feeling to do anything he asks for even the things that aren’t necessarily good for him like unhealthy food or too much caffeine. It was as if a voice inside of me was telling me it was now time to let go.

It may or may not be time but the look on his face says it all. Although he can’t express with words his eyes are pleading for us to stop torturing him with routine!

And we succumbed without negotiation…I don’t know what happened but I felt that we were inspired to grant him his freedom.

I never felt this scared ever since we were faced with the reality that my father’s brain tumor was untreatable. I don’t know what to think or how to rationalize or come to terms with the possibility of anything happening anytime soon.

A million thoughts are thundering through my head. I suddenly feel guilty for every second I complained about my father’s symptoms or felt tired because of them. I feel guilty for sometimes thinking of him as a burden!

I can’t help it but lately my memory is taking me back to the different stages of my father’s journey with his disease and it’s tiring to think of everything we went through.  

I don’t know why this is happening to me but I feel that God has suddenly granted me double the patience and double the strength to carry on caring for my father with all the love there is.

I must admit that sometimes I look at my life in the past nine years and ask God why? Why did I have to go through all this? Why was I chosen among all these people to live the most vital years of my life worrying about loss? I lost my mother and lived all these years worrying about losing my father.

And the scariest thought is that sometimes I feel like I lost sense of reality and can’t physically identify with most of what happens to me and around me. I sometimes make believe that I was and still am watching a long movie.