WARNING: Heavy Topic.
I wasn't really surprised when my dad died.
Our last conversation had already taken place in different worlds, his voice coming out distant and mechanical, as if being broadcast from a place I couldn't reach.
Still, the five-hour-long trip to his final resting place put everything in perspective and gave me a bit of a hard lesson on how both the body and the mind operate under such circumstances, unleashing a sort of "civil war" between the endless sweetness of the heart and the infinite coldness of the brain, both pushing me towards certain emotions, thoughts, and feelings as the car zoomed by nothing but farmland as far as the eye could see. It was a battle between the need to face reality and the urge to escape it, playing before me all sorts of sweet memories laced with just enough venom to turn nostalgia into scars, and then interchanging them with little alerts, pangs of tremendous pain almost designed to keep me focused on the road ahead. I don't know why my heart and head would ever do this, but I guess it was a necessity... otherwise I'm sure there would have been two funerals that day, as my focus wasn't on the road at all.
There was a sort of surreal quality to being shown random flashbacks with little in common, strung together by an almost primal need to save as many details as possible in the mental vault of memories, making sure that voices, gestures, looks and feels would be preserved for future reference in their purest form, imperfections and all... and perhaps that's the reason why so many of the memories playing before me were either completely random or completely exaggerated.
As I was stopping at a red light, I remembered the time we got gloriously drunk and ended up dinning raw meat for a few minutes, before our brains woke up and asked us what we were doing.At a random intersection I recalled in great detail how we used to sit with my baby sister and watch both "LazyTown" and "Backyardigans", getting way into them, despite being several decades outside their target audience.
As I shifted gears, I remembered how much he admired Robbie Rotten and how he usually played the part just for Stefi's (my baby sister) delight.
My dad's whole contact list... I often wonder which wacky character he had picked for me XD
When I checked the glove compartment for a map (this was before GPS was a common thing, kids!), I couldn't help but smiling at the thought of him "sniping" the TV with his phone camera, trying to picture the characters on both of those aforementioned shows to use as profile pics for his coworkers (and he was in the military, so it was actually really hilarious seeing high-ranking officers represented by CGI animals designed to appeal to toddlers).
A bad turn made me remember about the time we were playing "A-10 Cuba!" and he started trying random button combinations on his keyboard, completely ignoring the little reference sheet on the CD case... resulting on him ejecting the pilot through the hangar.
Watching a street performer juggle balls and bottles reminded me of the time I accidentally deleted some of his custom players on FIFA 98, and how exaggerated his reaction had been as "(blank)" scored the winning goal for El Porvenir.
Maaaan... was he pissed when I accidentally sabotaged his custom player database.
And when I finally stopped the damn thing, parking the car on a random street corner, I was afforded the memory of when he sat me and my sister down for a talk, sternly warning us about not talking at all once on the microphone he had just bought, because he thought that the computer would "freak out" and freeze if overwhelmed, honestly believing that we would be able to voice control it with a $2 piece of a plastic that he had bought off the street and with no accompanying software. With how much awe we heeded this advise, both pleading and demanding that the computer would do something, anything as we kept screaming into the thing...
I often burst out laughing whenever I come across one of these because of how much faith my dad placed on them.
But as I walked the distance to the funeral home, a second set of thoughts and feelings started to materialize in my mind: I was angry. SO VERY ANGRY.
I was angry at the world for continuing on as if nothing had happened, DARING to ignore the tremendous pain I was feeling as all those other people just went about their lives, not even realizing how fortunate they were to even have them.
I was angry at my dad for dying in such an idiotic, preventable manner... producing and inhaling more smoke than the damn Industrial Revolution.
And I was angry at myself for granting him the ultimate mercy, sneaking a pack of Marlboros into the hospital, so he could have one last smoke, right after he had been informed that the treatment was not working.
But the thing about emotions is that, even the strongest ones, are temporary, and tend to dissolve as soon as something bigger enters the ring... and that's indeed what happened as I made my way to the mourning crowd, exchanging pleasantries and halfheartedly nodding as I was being given sympathy by those who had loved him just as much as I did. My new emotion was one of agonizing uncertainty, as the "civil war" reignited inside of me, with my heart wanting for the moment to be over so I could escape the sight of him laying in a wooden box, and my brain reminding me in agonizing detail that, once the lid was firmly sealed on top of him, that would be the last time my dad and I would see each other in the same physical space. It was a torturous thought, and so I spent that night just being torn to pieces by something I wasn't ready to face, not able to understand... was this really it?
At one point a friend of mine sat beside me and started talking to me in the softest, most understanding voice ever. He was a barber who was so chill and so beloved that his shop opened 24 hours a day, many of those with him at the helm. I was very touched by the fact that he'd close that store just to attend his funeral, but I honestly couldn't give him the attention he deserved... his words, comforting at they were, were of little use for me. For I knew he was speaking the truth, and what he was saying made perfect sense... but logic has no place in grieving, and you can't analyze a crisis while being in the middle of it.
When the whole thing was finally over, when that second that felt like a year, and when that year that felt like a second was finally done with and behind me, I knew I was free to get back on my car, and drive away... but I just couldn't do that. There was something buried deep inside of me that urged me to take one last look around, begging me to reestablish the connection that had just been severed through the experiences we shared, urging me to walk around a place he loved so much as to choose to die in it.
While I'm not a particularly spiritual person, I do believe that all of us have a friend in nature, a sort of whimsical entity that, sometimes, gives us a hand and allows us a sort of inexplicable comfort as everything around us goes to hell with terrifying speed. My "friend", whoever or whatever it was, had a sick sense of humor, and so it made me walk around a decayed shell of what used to be paradise, underlining my mental state with a precision rarely seen outside of a stupid Hollywood (or perhaps Hallmark) script in which everything just comes together because reasons... it was kinda interesting, in a sick and twisted way. Because, you see, the place that had once awed me with its natural beauty and unparalleled cleanness seemed to had been taken over by an horde of drunk hooligans, reducing that little slice of paradise to a graffiti-infested, trash-filled chasm which nothing but the biggest of disgusts seemed appropriate to describe. Oh! The natural scenes were still among the most beautiful on the face of this blue Earth, but the things surrounding them were definitely not.
Paradise Lost.
The worst sight of all was the little waterfall I had been enamored of, which I liked to call "Mother Nature's Third Grade Art Project" because of both its passion and imperfection.
Why was it bad? Because someone was apparently dumb enough (and mean enough) to risk their neck just to tag their name on the rocky outcrop just to its right, a moss-filled, often wet (and extremely dangerous) climb that people were advised to leave the hell alone. Seeing such gratuitous destruction of something so innocent and so beautiful was just about the perfect visual representation of my mood at the time. My friend still got it.
When I was about to leave for good, I asked for a box containing some of my dad's "e-waste", the many gadgets and trinkets he had accumulated over the years, childishly believing in the amazing things they could accomplish if he could just find the right use for them... and among the endless amount of barely-functioning trash I dug through, I found both his phone and his old digital camera, the Polaroid he had once lent me and that was of such... early quality that it didn't even work at night. I picked both up and took them with me as I located a place to sit back and began examining them.
I didn't really get to keep many of my dad's belongings, but I treasure these two.
Scrolling through his Nokia, I was surprised to see that he, at one point, had installed "Las Vegas Nights" by GameLoft in there. I didn't know he was into those games, and the realization made me feel even sadder because that was about par for the course at that point: I had found the bridge right after it had collapsed. A part of me wanted to scream really badly, as I could just about imagine what would have been like to sit with both him and Laura, taking turns deciding what to do on that game, moving our cartoonish character around as we tried to accomplish goals (or get pissed drunk, beaten and broke). I pocketed the phone again right after that, my thirst for exploring what the rest of his mobile life was like thoroughly satisfied for now (I also didn't think it too classy to be snooping around his text messages as his body was still warm just a few miles down the road). With a bit of a resigned head shake, I turned on the camera and began playing around with it, being honestly quite surprised that it had apparently been in use until recently (the digital counter indicating available storage being less than half full). I was tempted to run back into his house, plug the thing in and see what kinds of things had caught his eye so much as to try to preserve them through the nearly blind eye of that early devise, but I just couldn't bring myself to it. So, instead, I burned the remaining of its internal memory, taking pictures of this profaned paradise as I aimed the camera at disrupted nature, piles of trash and the endless, breathtaking nature that surrounded it all, only paying attention not to picture any of those grotesque tags and graffiti that had fouled the whole thing.
It was pretty bittersweet finding out that we STILL liked the same games.
As I returned to my dad's new home and proceeded to give back both the phone and the camera, I realized that my invisible friend had just offered me the perfect ending to that whole ordeal, as I spotted the "Queen's Greatest Hits" tape that had solely fueled me during my "detox" days in that beautiful prison without bars. It would have been a spotless conclusion to that whole thing, showcasing the circle of life and all that good stuff, but I didn't take my friend up on that offer, and instead asked to keep the camera as a memento of sorts (which was granted), and got back on my car, never to return again.
It's interesting, really, how much everything can change in just a few moments... how the drive to that accursed place had filled me with dread and been the center of a vicious, internal war. How the drive away was underlined by the coldest of silences, as if no thoughts were allowed to exist as I was speeding away, each passing vehicle, road sign and structure both highlighting and dulling the pain.
When I finally got back home around seven hours later (having stopped to rest for a few hours, not fully trusting the sharpness of my reflexes yet), something indescribable begged me to plug in the camera and see what its contents were, as if that could solve anything... still, I did just that and burst out laughing because I had underestimated just how primitive the devise really was, having many of my pics washed of color because of the scorching sun that was bathing the places and the lack of shadows for contrast. I guess it makes perfect sense that my last images of that place would be so broken, but what I truly caught my eye was an afternoon shot my dad had taken nearly a year earlier: in it, a Marlboro box laid on the ground on his front yard, the little aluminum foil inside glinting just ever-so-slightly as to give it a faint aura of importance. And I know that it is silly to go looking for some hidden meaning on every little thing, but I did find the sight slightly (and strangely) conforting.
It is in my writing style (and, indeed, my nature) to finish my articles with some flourish, but I'm not gonna do that this time... so instead, I leave you with this: Hug your loved ones, dudes. Hug them a lot.
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