Dad

A Story by Yangy

A monologue about the death of my Dad.

Eight and a half years. It’s a long time to be depressed, to live in a constant state of darkness and fake smiles. From the age of barely even nine years old. But you were taken from me, and much like the light in my life after the moment you died, no treatment could save you, and now you’re gone. You were my Dad, and now you’re just a painful memory, an everlasting scar on my personality, a scar that attracts pity from those whom will never understand how it feels to lose your hero, to have half the reason you exist ripped from your life like an old plaster before you’ve even lost all your baby teeth.

I joke about the stupid things you said, the adventures you had, the man you were. Well, the man I am told about, I didn’t get enough time to know the real you, what you thought of the world. I knew the man who devoted all his attention into making his son happy, not the one who faced his own fears, not the man who hid a terrifying darkness behind his smile, like I do. Maybe if I knew you I could understand how I feel now, but I don’t. I just know the stories, the legends.

I see other people with their dads, sharing music, films, video games, stories - You name it. I can’t share my life with you, you never got to see me grow, to find out who I really am, to help me become who I am. Your void moulded that part of me. Perhaps I’m a better person for it, perhaps I’m not as contempt in my life as I imagine myself with you being there. I don’t know. I never can.

You’re gone. You’ve been gone for eight and a half years, but it feels like an eternity and yet no time at all. Truth be told, I don’t know what I’d say to you if you came back, I don’t know if my life would get better or a lot more complicated.

I only ever got to see you once, it was both not enough but too much. Seeing your lifeless comatose body, broken and scarred, fade away into the infinite dark pit off nothingness destroyed me. It shredded the hope I had left. You were covered in blood, you had tubes and needles covering your body, keeping your heart beating within your corpse. To keep your brain sending the partial messages it tried to get out, the messages that instilled a false hope in us. A blinking eye, a moving toe, a chilling thumbs-up. All leading us to believe you were going to be okay. I guess, in a way you were.

You were a builder, an artist, a traveller. You used your hands, you would live no other way. If you woke from your month-long slumber, you’d have hated your new still life, so perhaps it’s for the better. Your body can help build new life, paint new landscapes, your mind can travel wherever it wishes. From what I do know if you, that’s what you would have wanted, to be free from the limitations the world put on you.

But none the less, you’re still gone. Why is it that I’m the one who can’t breathe when you’re the one that had your lungs fill with blood? Why is it I can’t stand up when you’re the one with the broken bones? Why is it I’m the one who can’t think when you faced severe brain damage? Why do I feel dead inside when you’re the one that lost your life?