Black Friday

My father is dead. When I found out, I felt nothing. Isn’t there supposed to be something? When I think back, I’d always imagined feeling relief or satisfaction or freedom or… something. Instead of pondering about what he was, what he did, who he was supposed to be, I imagined that I’d be able to think about him dispassionately, without remembering… without subconsciously touching my tongue to the inside of my lip, feeling one of the many scars he left. There were so many reminders of him around me, on me, in me. It’s more than just the face I see in the mirror, the grey eyes, the frown, the dark, bushy eyebrows… I can’t exactly get away from that. I don’t remember the last time I talked about the man who was supposed to be my father. Now, I can’t tell them that he’s dead either. 

Why can’t I tell people? The thing is, I have become so accustomed to simply omitting him from conversations, that I don’t even have to think about it anymore. I simply remove myself from whichever conversation leans towards family, parents, fathers… anything that reminds me of him. Quite the expert. This week, two of my colleagues at the restaurant spoke about how their fathers disciplined them when they were young. One  said how their dad only gave them one hiding in their lives. They spoke about it like some fond memory, like it was a quirk, an oddity, a well-deserved reprimand. The other colleague responded with a comment about how they absolutely deserved the spankings they got as a child. At that moment I felt like I was floating outside my body, as if I was leaving the room while still physically standing there. It felt like I was removing myself from him… no, as if I was trying to remove what remained of him from myself. How do I remove something so ingrained within myself? How will I be able to simply be myself? Will I ever be able to do this?

I know for a fact that he is dead - heart failure at 62. I understand, logically, that he is not coming back. Though I have twice seen him fleetingly, from a distance, in the last 15 years, I can never quite shake the feeling that I can run into him at any time, in the most obscure places… the market, the doctor’s office, the road that runs past my apartment. It’s as if his shadow, his essence, his very being always lingers, hovers over me, around me. It is like a cold spectre that looms just out of reach, but close enough to always be felt.

His funeral will be soon. I have made up my mind that I am certainly not going. Most people would probably disagree with my choice (if they knew about it at all). Maybe others would want to see someone like that being lowered into the ground, being covered, hidden from the world forever. That might be what they need to get closure, to make peace, to sleep better. That’s not me, though.

The way I am dealing with this may seem cold or detached to most, but they don’t know how long I have been working on burying the man that had slowly been killing me. I have been ridding myself of his touch, of his preferences, of his personality, of his influence… everything… for more than a decade. If I’m being honest, that had simply meant running from everything that haunted me, but that’s how I learned to survive - get out before it gets worse. Get away from him before he gets to you. I have asked myself countless times why I didn’t leave sooner.

What I had been doing, was to delay dealing with my trauma. The residual effect of those years of abuse have lasted much too long. I see it in my interactions with people, my responses to situations, my reactions to hearing certain words or phrases. That darkness lingers within me… his darkness. It’s so easy for people who don’t know, to say things like, “Just get over it,” or, “Just let it go.” They have no idea. 

It’s not my unwillingness or inability to let go that have held me back. There are entire years that I can only remember as a horrifying blur - fear and loathing have become so ingrained in who I am, that it has taken years of painstakingly restoring the damage he caused. His death is not going to be some magical catalyst, some instant relief. I see it as merely a part of a bigger endeavour, a torturous, tortuous journey of rebuilding myself.

Black Friday. What an apt name for the day on which he died. For all the darkness he brought to my life there was no ray of light that appeared when he left. There was no sense of an era of pain coming to an end. It was just another day for me. Having had a few days to think, I have decided to make it the day that I buried him. I’ve had one and a half decades to distance myself from everything he was: a monster. 

It is time to take back my life - he has no hold, no right, to have any sort of influence over me anymore. I also realise that there will still be many bad days and probably many more bad nights. There will be triggers; I will handle them. There will be dark thoughts; I will deal with them. There will be better days; I will embrace them. There will come a time when I will be able to look at a picture of him without feeling like something is sinking its claws into my stomach, without feeling like something is clutching me by the throat. There will come a time where I am able to speak about him out loud, though somewhat dispassionately, without being reminded of the childhood he stole from me. My father has been dead to me for a very long time, but on Friday 26 November, I finally buried him.