50 and beyond

Today is…or rather, was my dad’s birthday. If he were still alive, he would be 82 years old today.

It was only a few days after Father’s Day this June, that I realised that I had not thought about my father at all on Father’s Day.

He passed away in Feb 2018.

Initially, I thought about his passing daily. After a while, he would cross my mind once in a while. Now, I hardly think about him.

When COVID hit the world, I thought how fortunate it was that he was gone already and didn’t have to go through lock-down during COVID. He was in a nursing home and so advanced in dementia that he was unable to speak, and quite unable to ingest food. He would have felt so isolated if none of us family members were able to visit him because of the lock-down.

I only think about my dad a few times a year now. During his birthday, during the day he passed away and on 1 January when we make our way to Mandai to place flowers in his niche.

There was a time when I thought I would never forget the days leading up to his passing. Today, I cannot remember much, except for the short poignant moment when my mom told him that she forgave him. I can barely remember watching him breathe his final breath. I am glad that I penned it down, even though I thought it might have been sacrilegious to have done so, so that I have some memories to cling on to.

Do I feel guilty about not having thought about him much now? No. He’s gone already. And I did my best to look after him in his last years.

When he was alive, I seemed to be stuck with the most painful memories of my childhood relationship and interaction with him. I wanted desperately to release these memories so that I could have a better relationship with him, but I couldn’t. The song list of U2’s ablum All That You Can’t Leave Behind provided me with the psalms to pray. It was my prayer album. Bono’s lyrics gave me the catharsis to release and Walk On. In those years, I never not teared whenever I listened to that song.

With him gone now, I only want to remember the good memories…but I seem to be clutching at straws. Perhaps I will sit down and pen down the good memories before they completely fade away.