EXPERIENCES UNBELIEVABLE…

It’s been almost four months now, since my dad passed away. It seems a long time but not that long; it’s somehow confusing how I suddenly was lost at tracking the time me, my mom and sister lived without my father. After four months, I still can’t accept it, it’s still so unbelievable to me, I feel that my dad is still alive and he’s just still working in Dubai, I was used to him not being with us because he’s been working hard for our future, a future that turned out to exclude him. Every Sunday since the interment of my father, we visit his grave and bring him fresh flowers; it somehow gives us even a brief comfort knowing that his final resting place would always be kept tidy, that birds of paradise and white roses would always accompany him, and that we frequently visit him.

I still can’t swallow the facts, my father is dead? When did that happen? Last Nov. 27 Edz, you were right beside him when his body gave way right? We have just arrived at his room in the hospital, then suddenly my mom and aunt told me and my sister “cge na paalam na kayo sa papa nyo”. WUHAT? WHY? “What are you people talking about? Why should I say goodbye to my father? Of course he’s not gonna die.”

I saw him, breathing, slowly, opening his mouth, closing it again, opening it again. Until the last time he opened it, it never closed. I was there when the doctor pronounced him dead, when minutes later the nurse came and started to wrap his body with a white cloth and tied his feet with masking tape. I remembered wondering for a brief moment “Hey, what is she doing? Why is she wrapping the whole of my dad’s body, how can he breath? Why is she taping my dad’s feet? That would surely make him feel uncomfortable”. I suddenly forgot, he already left us. I still remembered when after a while his body felt so cold even touching it from the outside of the cloth that covers him.

I felt so helpless, the moment he breathe his last, I was....., it was unimaginable, the feeling unexplainable, it’s beyond me. I just reverted to a truth I know will always be true, that HIS thoughts are not my thoughts and that HIS ways are not my ways. Somehow even if don’t see it, everything will be fine.

I get this giant shake, like a wake up slap in the face; that I am living in a world where right any moment, people could just die. This is the first time I’ve seen someone cross the line between life and death, even though like all of us I’ve known that people really do die but nothing could have prepared me, us, for his departure.

There are so many things I’ve “experienced”, I would use the word experience rather than realized simple because I’ve already realized these things along time ago, but now I can say that I have experienced them.

I have experienced the fragile nature of the human body, that no matter the advances and development in science and technology still we cannot fully deny the inevitable. Our body is fragile so we better take care of it. I mean, we better start taking care of it. NOW!!

I have experienced the solid difference between theory and practice. That no matter how much understanding, study, preparation, anticipation, simulation and knowledge we have about something, all of that doesn’t even come close to the real thing. There are some things that no matter what you do, you really won’t be able to understand it, until you have experienced it. Period.

I have experienced the seemingly instant and unnoticeable passage of time. One minute it was September 2008 and I have just arrived in our villa in Dubai as a soon to be grade 4 student, I was a freshman in a newly constructed Filipino school, a corps commander who prematurely had to go back home in Philippines to take up the Summer Bridge Program then suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere I find myself in arms of my mother crying like a little boy, howling like a wolf, wiggling and stomping my feet with sorrow, but at the same time forcing reason, understanding and grace to fill me, otherwise I would have jumped out of the window of the hospital.

The rest of what I have experienced can be summed up by experiencing the fact that change is inevitable. Everything changes. Everything. But wait Edz, you’re a devcom student right? A “change agent”, the concept of change should be a piece of cake” – NOT!! Its worst than my STAT 1, CMSC21 and MATH 11 combined. (Plus my NASC 2 “The Boring Planet”) Everything changes, LIFE changes. That’s we should spend every second of our time properly coz once its gone, you’ll never have it back.

I now wonder when will I ever fully accept my father’s never coming back. That he’s gone forever. I still have a lot of questions; never know if they’ll be answered. Still, it’s unbelievable, experiences….

//Chaotic Thoughts//

-the voice of confusion-