I knew papa was drifting away. He was the shadow of his old self. The words became fewer. Conversations scarce. At 25, I was an adult. That is why we have little in common, I told myself. Life had serious matters now, no time for idle talk….that was the stuff of toddler days!
But there was the urge to say something, some ache beneath the mooted silence in the living room, where his now aged comfy chair stood large, and he would sit there every evening, hunched over and starting at the old Television set, his surprisingly still strong and well set teeth clattering every now again inside his shifting jaw drop.
Evenings weren’t long coming, and we’d quietly eat. The spoons and plates would clank away, as if to admonish the dead silence. The glug of water wetting down his dry throat would echo into the silence, almost embarrassingly. Not that it was really that loud, I mean, looking back now, it was the normal glug that sounds of your throat when you drink water, but that it echoed that much only tells you how dead the silence would be.
Occasionally I would catch his eyes resting on me from across the table, and another time, he would catch mine. Did he want to speak, to say something? Did i? But to say what? From since mum passed away, there had never been anything to say.
What was important was that I was working, and earning just about enough to fund his meals, and treat his arthritis. I was doing my part, meeting my responsibilities as child, I told myself.
And so it went on. Weeks passed, and rolled into months, then to years.,.. and the routine was the same. Then one day I looked as before to steal a glance at him from across the table, and there he was starting at me. Only this time, he kept his gaze….i quickly excused myself, glancing at my wrist watch to indicate I had, as usual, to get to bed early as I had a meeting early morning at office…
That was our last night together. By morning, I would find him peacefully sat in the old comfy char, his head leaning back on the sofa. Whatever else happened thereafter, I do not know, except that a doctor was looking down at me, no, not a doctor, a grey haired man in an old white coat. “You used to have those dreams when you were young” he said, sitting down on the decker next to me.
Had he been here all this while, just sitting and watching me in my sleep, like in the days when I was still a young boy, his boy? A part of me wanted to reach out, to say I missed those days, that I missed mum, him. But my lips couldn’t move, some voice adamant that was no way to behave as an adult.
“Just a bad dream, papa”, I said, a loud sigh escaping my nostrils, glad this whole stupid thing was a dream. He was still here. And maybe, just maybe, things had to change. Tapping my shoulders as if to show he understood, papa picked himself up and left, looking back before shutting the door behind him.
“Tomorrow! We’ll talk tomorrow, son” he said.
Tomorrow unfortunately never came, and I would find that out in the morning! the rest as they say, is history. I don’t believe in dreams and how they usually warn us of events to transpire, or at least I didn’t until that day…
And so it is, I never got to talk with papa. Now looking back, there is so much I could have said, if it wasn’t for the foolish pride of being an adult!
In nights when I would lie asleep and talk in dreams, and he would sit there watching me, lanky in the old bed he bought for my 16th birthday, I hope I said those words I used to say every morning and evening as a little girl, the I love you’s and I miss you’s, the good nights…
But I can never really know if I did. And I lost the chance. For you though, there just might still be an opportunity.
Quit the pride. Take the first initiative and mend the bond. Say those I love’s you’ while you still can.
Whether it is the childhood friend, a sibling, a father or mother, a neighbor…Don’t say let him/her say first. Because as you wait for him/her to say it first, he/she is also waiting for you to say it first! And the longer you both hesitate; the more the bond fades.
Sooner than you can anticipate, fate will have its say, and then it will be too late. You don’t want to know the weight of living with ‘what might have been’, of living with the unsaid, the un-done.
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