Home with relatives

I looked at the last picture taken of dad. He wore that red chequered shirt, the one that looked good on him... the same one that I once wore, and that he took to wear after I left it behind once.
Sitting around him at a restaurant table, my aunts and uncles, cousins and other relatives. That was over a season ago.

Down in Chiayi (嘉義) live most of my relatives, as it is where my dad was born and grew up. I like to sit down with dad's older sister (my 'big' aunt), and listen to stories about their past; stories that dad never really shared with anyone. Looking at the pictures of dad, my aunt said how he was so intelligent, and so good at writing. He even started to keep a diary as a teenager, and those words and memories are still somewhere to be found if we were to search through the old family home. I longed to be able to read what dad once wrote, so that I can understand and appreciate him a little more... even after he has gone.

I stroked dad's big smile in the picture, and imagined him sitting in the armchair opposite mine, the one he always sat in when he was at my aunt's. But this time, and forever now, it was empty.
Dad was the pride of the family, my aunt said, who studied hard, and left for the big city (Taipei) to start a new life from scratch. And how hard he worked, two, three jobs in the beginning, as a bank clerk, as an economics lecturer at a number of evenings schools, often eating very quickly between going from job to the other. I was only little then, but I remember days when I would stay up till perhaps after 10pm (late, for a little boy) and wait for dad to come home so I could tell him "Dad, how hard you have worked!" (爸爸辛苦了!) as dad entered the door. It was my evening-ly ritual... perhaps as a little boy I knew how hard dad worked to provide us with a comfortable home, and even then I was eternally grateful.

And years of hardwork and stress eventually took its toil on dad's health. More and more his health ailed, but he did not want to acknowledge it or get checked. Dad never complained, never said how tired or frustrated he was, and continued to work hard to provide us with a good education and carefree life. Who knew what he had to do, what dad had to sacrifice in the process? All he wanted was that I study well and excel to stand on my own two feet one day so that I will be able to contribute to society.

I put down the photo-album, and dad's smile disappeared with the closed page. I recounted that frightful phone call that Sunday evening, and again heard mum's jittery and weathered voice on the phone telling me to come home. How long that plane journey took, how I rushed in the pouring rain to arrive in the hospital to see dad lie there with closed eyes.... how, within a number of hours, I would be holding his hands as life and warmth slipped away from my fingers...

Dad has been gone over four months, and as I told a friend the other day, I have been thinking of dad less and less, and I am very afraid that I will one day forget him. Forgetting him is like he never lived, and that all he has done for me, all he has given me, never were...

Perhaps the fact that I had to clench my jaw to keep the tears in told me otherwise.