Page 1 of Last Letters to Ara
Present - Ara
DO YOU BELIEVEin soul mates?
Not the cheesy kind of soul mates you see in the movies. The kind that magically don’t hate the way the other person chews or doesn’t get annoyed when they leave their socks on the floor. I’m talking about that soul-deep connection you find with any other soul.
It could be your best friend. Your grandparent. Your brother. A cousin. You understand each other on such a basic level that you never need to explain yourself. They are your person, without a doubt. For me, that person was my dad.
Was.
As of a week ago, in fact.
Today is his funeral. Well, technically the pamphlets says that it’s a “celebration of life well-lived” but I can assure you that there will be no celebrating on my part. They should call it “a day of dumping truckloads of salt into a gaping wound that will never heal.” That would be a more apt description.
It was something that had never occurred to me, that one day Dad would die, and I would have to attend his funeral. I know that’s stupid. I mean, everyone dies. I just never consideredhimdying. Especially of cancer, after having kept it a secret from everyone until the very day it took him.
You might be wondering how a daughter doesn’t know that her own dad has cancer. Well, I can tell you. He was clever, and he didn’t want me to know that his life would soon come to an end. I’ve thought about it every day for the last seven days, trying to figure out how I didn’t see through his explanations.
When you don’t know something is wrong, things are easy to write off when given an answer for everything. His coughing was due to the “mold” they’d found in his office, nothing too serious, of course, but he would be taking some time off work while it’s fixed. He was tired because he discovered he had an allergy to such “mold.” He would be going to the hospital for standard checkups after being in long-term contact with “mold.”
Fuckingmold. I’msuchan idiot.
At first, I was in shock. Dad had never even had a cold for as long as I’d been alive. He had even gotten up and walked away from a motorcycle accident without a scratch on him. He was supposed to be invincible.
Until he wasn’t.
After the denial came the anger.
How could he keep something so serious from me? How could he deny me the opportunity to saygoodbye?
But the anger lasted only as long as it took me to imagine him trying to form those words. Having to tell his daughter, his best friend, that he is going to die. That he is being ripped away, far too soon, and there is nothing that either of us can do about it. Even if he’d tried to tell me, I know he never would have been able to get the words out. And I never would have been able to hear them.
Even if hehadtold me, it wouldn’t be any less painful. He would still be gone, and I would have had to see the only person I’ve ever depended on go through the kind of misery nobody deserves. It would have changed me forever. By keeping it from me, he’s preserved my memory of him, and I know that’s what he wanted. It’s what he thought would be best for me.
I can’t be too mad at him, anyway. It’s hard to be mad at someone who’s gone.
The funeral people, an official term according to me, asked if I’d like to get up and say a few words about him, surely expecting me to say yes. Most people would get up there after their loved ones die, to go on some sappy tangent about how much they loved them and cry their eyes out for the world to see. When you really love someone though, they know it through your actions. You don’t have to make a dramatic speech in front of a crowd to prove it.
So here I sit, quietly reliving our best memories, surrounded by people who didn’t really know Dad at all, while some random priest who is part of a religion we don’t belong to, preaches about how this was someone’splanto take my dad, which somehow makes it okay.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, it’s better than watching me pour snot all over the podium.
See, Dad and I kept our cards close. We didn’t shout our love from the rooftops or share our sense of humor with any random person who passed us by. We saved it for those who truly mattered. Each other. The extended family, people from work, and an old buddy from high school who hasn’t made an effort to see Dad in twenty years, didn’t know him the way I did.
To be honest, I didn’t even realize so many peoplehadknown him, until I saw how many people showed up to his service. These people only knew him as a friendly, yet reserved man, who was raising his daughter by himself. They saw him as a hard worker and successful, someone they could probably depend on in a pinch. As if that’s all he had to offer to the world.
They don’t know how much the world will suffer, how muchIwill suffer, without his dry, but hilarious sense of humor. His great, booming laugh that he saved for special occasions. The way a few of his words could right any wrong. The safety of his arms when everything seemed to be going awry. The thoughtful actions that he saved just for me.
The preaching finally comes to an end, followed by music, which I suppose is meant to sound uplifting, even though it fucking sucks. A slideshow of photos comes on, and I’m not prepared for the wave of grief that hits me, as photos of me and Dad come onto the screen. These people must have FBI-level connections to get access to these because I wouldn’t have handed them over in a million goddamn years.
Most of them are those overpriced photos they take when you visit a theme park (we live in Florida after all) or go on an excursion, but a few are from the first few weeks after I was born when my mother was still alive to capture those moments. They’ve even managed to get a few from the recent years where strangers volunteered to help us capture a moment.
With every photo that makes it onto the screen, I’m reminded again and again that these are the last of it. These are the last of our memories and we’ll never get the chance to make new ones. Dad isreallygone. The universe decided to take away the only person I could ever count on, and I don’t even get to tell him that I love him or thank him for being my dad.
The last photo comes on the screen, and I realize that it’s also the last photo we took together, six months ago on my twenty-second birthday. Sixdamnmonths went by, and I didn’t think to capture a single moment we shared. I’d thought we had all the time in the world.
Just then the music ends and people are...clapping?
I hate them all.
