Translated…
1.
Everybody is confused, about life, nobody has the answers.
One day as I walked down the streets in Taipei, this line popped up. For the days that followed, more lines came to me.
the life cycle…NOT my silhouette
Nobody can monopolize the truth, nor convince me that s/he is a-hundred percent correct, just because s/he was, willing to believe, wholeheartedly. This included anybody from Confucius, Mencius, to Jesus and Mohammed, including any and ALL intelligent scholars, scientists, artists, or thinker, all whom we thought, are above everybody else.
So, the only FAITH you have, is trusting in you, because you’re a skeptic, not believing in anything that you have ZERO experiences on, and this can be a good thing, because, that would drive you to seek out as many different experiences in life as you can possibly have.
2.
Where was I in Taipei when this thought came to me? Where, was I headed?
I was walking from Zhonghwa Road to Xiaonanmen, on my way to take the MRT, to visit my ailing father.
The terminal illness in his heart, death took over his whole heart too.
The grayed out skies, with the smoke filled atmosphere from the exhaust of cars.
I’m not used to this sort of a sky, so dirty, and hard for me to breathe in.
Not used to how this city had become so strange to me now, or how my father is going to die from his illness either.
So here, the skies reflected what the narrator was, experiencing in his own life, he’s about to lose his own father, that, was why the skies looked so grayed out to him…
3.
In this closed tightly, warm bedroom, there was, a man, who’s so ill he’d become reduced, to almost nothing MORE than a concept, thinner than the memories, my father, whom I’d not seen in three years, had been, run over by the huge will of disease.
My younger sister hollered out my name toward my father, I’d called dad aloud, causing a huge flower, to forcibly, bloom from his face.
not my photograph…
My father used his weakening strengths, called out my name weakly.
At that moment, how I shall, face my father took over me, and my sorrows were, suppressed, beneath what was about to happen.
You can’t dodge his gazes, can’t not pretend to be brave and strong.
This is, how we’re, socialized, to appear, before the dying, especially when the individual is someone we loved and cared about, and, we’re forced, to show that everything will be okay, that s/he will get better soon, but in the end, we’re just, lying to our loved ones, as well as ourselves too.
4.
I’d gone to visit dad time and time again in Yonghe. And stayed by the side of his bed, like a useless plastic vase.
My father’s hands are thin, his skin transparent, to can’t be any thinner, and his veins become like the blue streams that passes underneath it.
With his eyes closed, his cheeks slimmed down. He’d slept and awakened from time to time, hollered out in pain, wanted someone to massage him here and there.
I took my father’s left hand, rubbed it lightly. I’d never, held his hands like this, other than when I was younger and he was taking me across the roads, with my hand inside his, safe and sweet, so very, long ago. Holding his hands like this, close by him, only for two short weeks I’d returned to Taiwan, from the end of November to the start of December, and it was, only for a few hours during those afternoons. My eldest brother, my younger sister, my second younger brother and youngest brother, they’re, the ones, who looked after him, along with the Indonesian nurse’s aide who’d stayed by his side.
My younger sister was there with him for most, six days a week, from nine to five, six, or even, later. She’d watched over him closely, read his face, asked him if he wanted some water, there was nothing more pressing than this. As my father woke, she’d asked him if he wanted some water, or massage, and what day of the week it was, who he was. Other than that, just carry on in conversation with him, and if he still had the energies, then, inquired about the past, the rebuilding of his own history. And, my father took more and more time to sleep, weaker, and weaker.
“Ahhhhhh, I can’t do it, there’s, NO way!”, sometimes he’d begged and pleaded, “Stop asking me already!”
The chapters of his life, deleted slowly, page by page.
So, as the illness progressed, even as the elderly is still sharp, but her/his body is weakening, and, s/he is slowly become less and less energetic, about, to lose the will to live…
5.
We’d bumped our way, through all our ups and downs, happiness, sorrows, losses, and, we’d become, dust and dirt.
This trip, how much is at loss. Who can explain why we’re, here?
MY father woke from his sleep, exclaimed, “I’d been in so much pain, and nobody knows it!”
He’d awakened again, and pleaded weakly, “I want to, live until a hundred.”
Life and death, is confusing to us all, and, who will, have the answers?
So, this, is right before dying, when you’re, almost unaware, of your surrounding areas, where you are, who’s with you, but, you still have that sense of who you are, and, felt the need, to do something to leave a mark for yourselves, before life is up!
not my photograph…
6.
From whence we came, we will go. It’s not an explanation, but a description.
Shocked to see, that that shoot star had, brushed across the skies already. It’s serendipitous, but necessary too.
This, is everybody’s story.
Only our father’s story, belonged, to us.
So, this, is accepting life AND death as a pair, and finally getting that closure on his own father’s death, and, the narrator realized, that although life and death comes to everybody on earth, his father’s stories are unique, to him and his siblings solely.
Advertisements Share this:
