4th Entry

My Dad

My dad hated it when I slowed everyone down.
He also hated it when I wasn’t at the top of my class, when I talk about wanting to become an artist, or when I needed help getting out of bed in the middle of the night because I’ve had too much milk, and I’d always been so sorry about all that,
but I was strapped to a wheelchair. My dad hated it when I slowed everyone down, and there was nothing I could do. That was the one thing I could not help, so instead, I’d cry a little and he’d look away.

My dad hated it when I slowed everyone down.
He never said it to my face, but I can feel it in the disdain of his gaze, the slow deliberation of his breathing, and the offbeat tapping of his foot as I try to haul myself up our house’s front steps.
(He wouldn’t help me, because it built character.)
We were a proud people, he told me, but he was not proud of me.
I once walked into his English class to visit him (it was the day I got back from my surgery—he decided to keep on teaching instead of staying with me because he shouldn’t be selfish), and he was telling the class how the corruption of the soul manifests itself in the corruption of the body.
I wheeled myself away and told my mother let’s wait at the canteen to tell him the good news— that it was a success, that I won’t need a wheelchair anymore, that I won’t slow everyone down again.
I didn’t tell her that I saw him see me from the corner of his eyes, and he didn’t tell her that he knew that I knew he saw me from the corner of his eye.
I moved to Toronto the next year.

My dad hated it when I slowed everyone down, and he died last Sunday.
He was old, sick, and, like all fathers eventually do, he passed away.
Mother got angry because I didn’t cry—couldn’t.
She hated it when I smiled and chatted to dear cousins and old friends, she hated it when I laughed at some joke my cousin Damien made, she hated it when I couldn’t make myself apologize, and I was very sorry for hurting her,
but I don’t love him. My mother got angry when I couldn’t cry, and there was nothing I could do. That was the one thing I could not help, and I am glad I didn’t lie about that at the very least.
I am so happy and so heartless. I guess he was right after all.