I leave the door of my father’s car swung open as I approach the grayed house I recognize from my distant childhood. As he takes his tire pump out of the trunk, I step through the doorway of his childhood home.
There stands the delicate wooden front door, carved by the bare hands of my father’s own father. Inside hung still the curtains sewn by my father’s mother, gathering undisturbed dust. Though I share the blood that has built this place, I cannot help but think that the distance of the vacant roads between their doorstep and mine has solidified into an impenetrable wall of familial distance.
I watch as my father begins to pump his flat tire back into life. From the front door of his childhood home, I grapple with who he has become — a relic of the future within the monument of his past, my past.
His mother is dead.
Today, as her casket is being shut, I will not be sobbing over my father’s mother. Instead, I will stand at the back of the crowd, clad in black amid a sea of white, standing with my father, who too has become a stranger to his home cradle. I stare at my father’s trembling hand and realize that he is burying his mother, while I am burying a woman I barely knew.
Once upon a time I would have resented him for it. How would you feel if I only visited you once a year? But I feel the pain in his eyes, the strength in his grasp, and I know that he did it for me.
He could not bear to hand the same childhood to me — a life of head lice and cold meals, snake bites and sun-beaten skin, a world as small as three streets and a chapel. For my sake, he left everything he ever knew. He nourished me in the green grass of a two-storey house with running water and warm food — a world away from the rice paddies and dried-up irrigation of his backyard.
I have never seen my father cry before, but on the day we found out about his mother’s passing, we drove in the night just so he could feel the last of the warmth leave her body. Stooping over her frail frame, he caressed her bony skull, pushing back the strands of her shining white hair. His mother, his mother. Tears welled in his eyes.
On the drive home, he was silent. We could do all but talk. We drove into the sunset, the radio a welcome cushion to cover our silence. My father, my father.
- Micah Seiri
(Illustration by Miles Munich Montreal Jimenez/FEU Advocate)