During an application for a scholarship to #20BooksVegas, I was faced with this hardly-innocuous query:
Write about the hardest thing you’ve ever done.
I didn’t think. Or switch to my laptop to prevent further damage to my hands. Simply tapped a finger in the text box and began slugging away with injured thumbs:
“The hardest thing I’ve done is the easiest to write about, and the underlying topic of every piece of fiction I pen; losing my father. He was stolen from my life at age nine by choices all his own, and it’s as if my fully-formed memories stop there. Everything that’s taken place afterward feels like a lucid dream, and I’ve been in that dream state for the past twenty-six years. His loss might not have felt as abrupt, or jarring, if I weren’t kept in the dark about the severity of his illness. I was allowed to coast happily through the beginning of 4th grade without a care in the world, not having an inkling my father wouldn’t make it to Christmas. My mother attempted to shield me from the horrors of reality, and when the time finally came for us to face it together; she choked, leaving my half-sister to blather on something asinine about Angels and my father being one of them, ready to “spread his wings”.
Confused. Devastated. But mostly numb, I rode to the hospital I’d stopped visiting because there seemed like no point. I’d see dad when he came home. Why bother to visit?
Because, to newly minted ten-year-old mind, people only went to the hospital to get better. I made it to double digits without fully grasping some people don’t come home. Until my dad didn’t.
No one forced me to go. Explained we might have little time. I barely saw him, until the time game to pull the plug. The disease won, which meant we lost. I said goodbye to his eyes because he was intubated. I cried, I apologized, we rode home in silence without my father, and my mother never mentioned it again.
I found his urn two years later.”
I also didn’t get the scholarship. But? There’s always next year.
Until there isn’t.
Love Always,
Originally published at https://tragicsandwi.ch
