My dad is dead (revised)
I don't know if I miss him or not. Did I really know him? What was I ...
I don't know if I miss him or not. Did I really know him? What was I for him? Was I his redemption? Did I really care about him or was my relation to him just selfishness? I wonder if it is supposed to feel like in normal families.
My dad was an alley cat.
He never made it big in life though he was smart. He always struggled for his next meal. Too independent to be adopted, and too tough to be caught by animal control, he was just a tough and stubborn old bastard.
I have blurred uncomfortable kitten memories of violent catfights between him and my mother. Well... I think those fights destroyed the little spark in my mother somehow... Yet, she proved how strong and resilient she was. She had decided she would protect me from what she endured before I got hurt. One day, she found the opportunity and fled with me.
We became run aways, hiding from place to place, running from his destructive madness.
Eventually, one night a family found my mom in a dark parking lot being teased and beat up with a broomstick by someone. They intervened and compassionately adopted us. My mother was a scared wild furry at first. Having been beaten and scared by cruel people, she had learned to distrust people. They slowly tamed her with their love. We became a family in a real house.
I think felines are not supposed to be mated for life. Maybe that's why it all had to fall apart that way with my dad. We can't fight our nature, right? Yet, we cats are weird like that: We crave a family dwelling but we can't really cope with it either. Anyways, after all the fear and running, the newfound dwelling granted me the respite a cub needs to grow up. That is, Until he found me again.
He had been relentlessly looking for me all my life and I had no idea. I had forgotten him and moved on... Years rolled by for me, but his life was frozen in time to the day his mistakes lost him everything. He had refused to move on, and he found me.
That skinny cat looked scruffy and tough. He seemed uncomfortable, sitting immobile on the porch of our house. He was staring at me intensely as I was walking home. That was our first encounter. He was bones and muscles, not big but really tough looking, and such an intense penetrating glare in his eyes. I could not read him. Worse, he froze my thoughts to ice.
I was now a cub on the verge of adulthood, not the tiny furball that was torn out of his life anymore. It had been years. As a matter of fact, it had been most of my life at that point. To me, he was a brooding stranger that somehow looked familiar. Deep down I knew who he was. He was that mysterious fearsome father figure that I didn't care to meet. An embodiment of forgotten childhood fears. I was scared of the unknown. I was scared of what I knew, and I knew only to fear him. Confused distorted memories of violence and anger resurfaced, like the tentacles of a long forgotten primal nightmare reaching out from depth of my mind.
My mom wasn't home to protect me from him, nor from my petrifying memories. I was alone, no cocoon, no blanket, no safety net. No escape from a confrontation. My mind was blank, confused... I was filled with the ultimate kind of fear that freezes you, not the kind that makes you scream and run away.
He just asked politely if he could come in.
He had come in peace, to win me, not to torment me nor to kidnap me. I didn't know how to refuse. I didn't know if I wanted to refuse, nor knew if I could refuse. So I accepted to let him in. My recollection today is just of an awkward moment with us sitting there on the couch, not too far from each other, silent, shy and I was petrified by the idea of an onslaught of madness. I don't know what we talked about... It was inconsequential. The fact is, he had given up his life to come back for me. This time, his resolve was following the voice of reason and control. He would not give in to violence or temporary insanity. The price had been too dear. He had come to ask permission to see me again. Maybe that's why his eyes were so intense and unreadable. He was on a mission of redemption. He would not let himself make me a victim. I was still very uncomfortable, yet I was accepting the idea of him.
I was going to be slowly rediscover my dad again. My mom did not approve of him. She could never forgive nor trust him again nor be near him. He had broken her forever. Yet, she gave me the freedom to make my choice. She knew it very well: Cats make their own mind and cannot be forced. After a few gifts and letters, he invited me. From now on I would be off in the summers to see him where he lived. I entered his foreign life.
It was a strange new adventure for an emerging young tom. He showed me a very different life... How to survive head high, strong, hunting for scraps in the back alleys. A different culture altogether. An opening of my mind. He was not the kind to beg people for food, he was too proud for that. At first, we lived broke, in the back of an old print shop with his brothers and sisters, but he kept moving here and there and he finally built a less shabby, more stable life.
I still remember the scent of the searing summer heat, the smell of the heated air rising in slow pulsations from the hot asphalt. We had moved to the back of a run down gas station. The sign advertizing 97 cent gas was a whopping 2 cents cheaper than the competition, a significant appeal in this ghetto neighborhood. That smell of poverty was also the smell of freedom, the way of the felines. Proud. Dirty. Tough. Independent.
My dad had violent outbursts alright, but he had a personal yet strong sense of moral and family. You've seen pissed of cats. It's a sight to behold. Those teeth and claws multiply like the hands of Shiva. Fur flies all over the place. He hated himself for his uncontrollable violence. It had destroyed him. My mother running away had wounded him deeply yet he only had himself to blame. He still madly loved and admired her but he knew winning her back was impossible. He had accepted it. She too was strong, fierce, independent, yet fragile at the same time. How could he not love her? How could he not see she would flee to protect her only true treasure from destruction? That she would win and break him?
I wonder about my connection to my dad. All this confusion in my feelings, my inability to fully commit my love to him. All that time of discovery with him, yet I was still aloof. He had brought me into his own world too late for me to embrace it at heart. I somehow felt like a tourist. One that is fully immersed, fully welcomed, but after the vacation, I would return to my house cat life, as the weather would start turning. Of the reasons I kept going back, one was the strangeness I felt there and the other was him. I felt he needed me, and it was above me to deny him that. Or was I just too weak to tell him off? I was the link to shreds of illusions of a happy life he thought he had and lost. An illusion that he was so desperately longing for.
Well, time went by. I became an adult. I did some travelling of my own, and eventually I settled down closer to my dad. I settled far enough that he could not come randomly to see me uninvited. That worked for me. I also did not fear him anymore, I had become bigger and stronger than him, so now his outbursts of rage had become puny tantrums to me. What was the big deal? Why did it cause so much damage? Well, he had also mellowed significantly by then, so those outbursts had grown rare. We had mended the pieces of our lives. Not a pretty mosaic, but a ragtag set of broken parts picked up and half hazardly put together with the glue of despair to build an incomplete image, still just broken parts if you looked too closely. But it was something.
That brings me to now... My dad is dead.
It started a couple of weeks ago after I visited him. I had left him tormented but I thought nothing of it. He had good reasons to. We just got the news that my cousin committed suicide. Her sister found her dead cold in the litter they shared. She had done that as a terrible punishment for her parents. She was angry at them for birthing her, for making her so small and so awkward. My aunt was one of those tiny, pretty kitties... For some reason my cousin didn't appreciate her own beauty. Out of place, she had plotted a solution to end her personal misery. She had succeeded... And her blind rage broke my dad inside once again.
On my arrival home, I was informed that my dad had been found unconscious and brought to a vet. I had to go back. As I arrived to the vet, he had awakened and was held down on a stainless steel table surrounded by vets. Somehow, though not fully aware, he was fighting his attackers, growling and begging a whiny plea to not be tormented any more. Who are you? Why are you doing this to me? Please!!! It was a terrible sight to see.
His mind was shrouded by confusion. He was helpless, squirming, incoherent. Unable to make coordinated movements, he was feebly fighting demons assaulting him in a wakened nightmare. It was so terribly demeaning... Once more I barely recognised my father. He was again a stranger, in his own strange universe, fighting a fight I could not comprehend. But the vets meant good, and he was fighting his own savior - They fought back and managed to save him.
They pumped him with drugs and eventually shaved his head to drill the pressure out. When I was allowed to see him again, he was a Frankenstein with a big scar and tubes in his head. He stunk of antiseptics and had an uncomfortable foreign body odor that seemed to come from inside that I did not recognise...
But he was OK. It was him again, even with the foreign smell seeping out of his head. He was more gentle as we re-acquainted. He was in good hands so I could go home. We left happy. He had been tamed by the stroke. Maybe we could finally be closer, doing away with the last shreds of violence and resentment. The fire of dissatisfaction in his eyes had extinguished.
Yeah... Well... It was not to be so... He relapsed shortly after, the blow was hard, and took him down, deep. He would not have a chance to fight this time. I was told that was it. He was still alive but now he would never, ever wake up. I had to go back. The vets wanted authorization to put him to sleep - definitively - pull the plug on a tormented life full of unsatisfied hopes, desires - and somehow paternal love. The weird, rejected kind of love... You can't make fairy tales out of that.
As I was travelling down for this last time, I stopped, as the melancholy was sweeping my mind into an abyss of despair. I halted in the middle of nowhere, a side road running in front of a large ranch. I watched a sad sunrise slowly flood the buildings and a sea of bovines sprawling in front of me to infinity. An ocean of misery.
There was fog from the dust and methane emanating from the dense concentration camp where cows were packed awaiting their fate. The refuse corrupted the light into an immobile orange hazy sadness. I was filled with melancholy, not sure of my emotions. I was alone, felt alone, and yet I had a sense of communion at that moment with this dull colored universe of martyrs. My pores were absorbing the sad, dirty light of that early morning. The misery and solitude of the world... No matter how many are around, you are ultimately alone with your destiny. All you can do is stand tall and face it, calmly, like those cows. No hope. No hate. No distress.
My dad had been alone all this time. His quest was pointless. We were all alone, together. Why was I sad then? I had been taught to be tough and independent.
I could feel the warmth of the light slowly reviving my soul. Why did I care what was going on then if we were not connected? Was there hope for me? This made me realize this wasn't necessarily bad. It was the ultimate realization of why cats are independent and proud. We have that ultimate understanding and are strong enough to accept it. We are not the kind to mop.
I decided to shake the melancholy to continue my journey, breathing deep to relinquish the hand of sorrow was squeezing my heart. Its grip was already weakening. I am stronger than that. That's why I'm a cat. I had business to attend.
I saw my dad on a bed. He looked peaceful. Though hooked on machines, he had regained his dignity. The disturbing smell was still there, but it didn't bother me as much. It wasn't as strong. I had adopted it as part of this moment.
The vet, honestly, non apologetically announced to me that his body functions were failing. I respect him for that: I hate whiners.
I would not need to make a tough decision, my dad was going out on his own terms. His last gift to me. I would not have the guilt of patricide.
As his last heartbeat took his breath away, he left peacefully, finally a moment of calm in the rough seas of his life. I was there, watching over him for once. And I felt him go... I felt the brush of his soul flying in the ether.
The soothing brush of his presence watched over me for a few days. Then it faded, as he finally accepted that we could never be any closer.
Don't get me wrong, I have a thriving family that cared for my dad very much, stray cats tend to have large families. That didn't prevent him from being alone, desperate, and broke. My dad was also a romantic. One of my cousin recollected that once he wrote her a check for a thousand kisses for her birthday, because that's all he could afford to give her. As he died, my grandmother was also visited by a butterfly that landed on her as she basked her old bones in the sun. She took it as a sign that my father was at peace with her too.
I sincerely wish my dad luck where ever he went. I wish him a better life without anger, he had a good soul deep down that didn't deserve the painful fate his life choices carved for him... for us...
Rest in peace.
Thinking of you now, I cry... Yes, I love you -. in my own weird way.