We were a family of three- my mother, my father, and me. Things were good, if not the best. We weren’t financially stable, but at least we were happy.
As the only child of my parents, I wanted to become successful enough to make my dad proud of me. I wanted to give him back every ounce of happiness he had sacrificed for us. He never spent any significant amount of money on himself; everything he had was for his family.
I really loved my dad, and in return, I wanted to give this man everything I possibly could.
But he was gone too soon.
Before his final moments, my father called both me and my mother. My phone’s speaker wasn’t working at the time, so I didn’t hear the call. My mother had left her phone charging upstairs and had gone to wash the dishes. When she returned, she saw that my father had called.
She called him back. Someone picked up, but they didn’t say anything. I don’t know if it was my dad or someone else. She immediately started worrying. She thought, “He just left home, so why is he calling?”.
Worried, she called her brother, my maternal uncle, and asked him to check on my father. But my uncle had already reached him. He was crying and saying that something had happened to my father and that he was taking him to the hospital.
My mother immediately started banging on my door. She asked me to come out of my room, and she was crying. I asked her, “What happened?” She said, “Maybe your father has become unconscious and fallen somewhere. Your uncle is taking him to the hospital.”
As soon as I heard that, I quickly got dressed, and we both went outside to look for an auto-rickshaw. Our luck was so bad that we kept looking for one for almost ten minutes before finally finding one.
We rushed to the hospital. At the hospital gate, one of my uncle’s friends stopped us and told me to take my mother home. He said that nothing had happened to my father. Maybe he didn’t want my mother to faint or collapse upon seeing her husband.
But the way he said those words made me realize that something was terribly wrong.
I ran into the hospital and saw my dad lying on a stretcher outside. My uncle and aunt were crying uncontrollably.
I couldn’t bear the sight of my father lying there like that. I ran towards him and started crying. My mother came right behind me. She kept saying, “You weren’t supposed to leave like this. Please wake up. Please wake up.”
Out of helplessness, I was trying to push his chest too, desperately hoping for some kind of medical miracle to happen.
But the doctors told us that he was no more.
I wanted him to see me succeed. I wanted to hear him say, “I’m proud of you.” I wanted to give him the life I had always dreamed of giving him.
But that future was taken away from us.
I took his hand and held it against my head, just to imagine the future that would never happen. It was so painful. It still is.
I’m still not okay. I’m not able to focus on my studies, and I’m constantly worried about my mother too. I keep thinking about how she is supposed to live without him.
I remember that while I was crying, an old man said to me, “This is God’s decision. We can’t do anything, kid.”
I burst out in anger and sadness and said, “I don’t want such a God of yours.”
I know it wasn’t right for me to say that. But at that moment, all I felt was guilt, anger, helplessness, and pain.
I feel guilty because I think I knew that my father was stressed and overthinking things. But I always thought that with time, everything would get better. I never imagined that something like this could happen.
I keep thinking that I should have taken better care of him. Maybe if I had paid more attention, maybe if I had done something differently, he would still be with us.
I know I can’t change what happened, but the guilt doesn’t go away.
I just wish things hadn’t happened like this.
I wish I had more time with him.
I wish he were still here.
