My father has died the day after I’ve got there. I saw him. He didn’t see me. He was in a deep coma for a while already. When I will become a believer in soul’s ability to cross the line between the physical and spiritual worlds, I should think that his soul was waiting for me and when I came, she finally found her peace and left the body. A nice consolation tale. Same kind as the tale told by the doctors about state of coma being a natural painkiller human mind developed to cope with great physical pain. Who knows if this is true. Only those who’ve been there and managed to escape. I’d like to think he didn’t suffer in his last days. I’ll ask him when I’ll meet him on the other side when it’ll be my time. For now I feel somewhat comforted by the thought his pain is now over. It wasn’t a long one either. Ironically, he didn’t die from the cause that brought him to the hospital but of an awkward unlucky accident happened while he was there. I believe that those guilty will face Ms Karma turning back to them sooner or later. I’m not interested in pursuing judgment. It changes nothing for him, for us, and therefore pointless. I will rather fill the rest of my life with good memories of him then with the anger about his departure.
Two weeks were spent in a foggy chill of dimmed emotions. Funerals are not the happiest of occasion as they are. Funerals in orthodox style designed to pin your heart to the cross of grief and prick it slowly until you start wishing to be dead instead of the one you’re grieving of. But this is how he would want it to be, being the follower of tradition himself, I’ve been told. And I went along with the grotesque theatre where the only actor who wasn’t acting his role, but “lived” it, was dead.
I’m grateful me and my mother have our time with him, have a chance to say our goodbye in privacy before they pull the curtains for the show. For the first time since a long long time and for the last time ever we’ve become a family again. Just the three of us. Him and us. It felt right. Everything else was just an autopiloted motion following a ritual that didn’t make any sense. To me, that is. At least we have managed to please everyone else. I’ve noticed myself and my mother were the ones who cried the least. Perhaps, it will hit us later. The loss. Although I dislike to call it this way. And I keep saying that he never really left, he is with us, always. I am trying desperately to make it into a faithful belief. I know by experience if you say something many many times, your mind adjusts so that it will become true. Who knows for sure. Maybe it is true.
So there it goes. An unexpected finale to yet another chapter of my life. I can feel a fresh breath of Fall and a slightly chilly touch of her hand upon my fingers as they are turning the page over…