My Father

I never completely understood how important a father is until I lost him on the early morning of July 19, 2017.

Unfortunately, I was not with him during the last few minutes or hours of his 71-year life. It’s not the first time I failed to show up when I was supposed to — in 2003 for HIS father and in 2009 for HIS mother. I wasn’t in Shanghai for all the three critical occasions. But I knew even though I was THERE, part of myself was not ready to accept the fact that I wouldn’t be able to see them, talk to them and have dinner with them for the rest of my life.

It has been more than seven months but THAT July moment may still pop up in my mind anytime anywhere — together with many other moments when my father was still alive.

Honestly, I didn’t have a good relationship with my father for the most of time because neither of us were quite willing to compromise — even with family members. Although we became “nicer” to each other after I got married, I still wouldn’t call our relationship a “healthy” one. Just three months before he passed away, I made him extremely angry only for trivial things, again — in a similar way that I infuriated him since my childhood. I thus guess, quite seriously, that it is my attitudes towards him that could have triggered his cancer over the time because no doctors on this planet could ever explain the real cause of the incurable Multiple Myeloma that shrouded my father since November of 2015. My reasoning, though not scientifically grounded, always immerses myself into deep sadness — even in the middle of giving a lecture.

Now I have become aware of my immaturity in a realest sense for the first time in my life. But my self-reflection came too late and my father would never know it.

Over the decades, he did numerous things for me, from cooking my favorite dish “sour potato” to accompanying me for school entrance exams. But the problem was that I took his love on me for stupid granted so that I seldom showed my genuine appreciation to him. I thought he knew I knew. I thought there would be plenty of time to let him know my thoughts in the future. I thought the future still had a long time before us.

But I was wrong.

I am no longer a kid and know that sadness won’t make a person happier when he was watching me from another journey in another world. Looking back, I have also been a father for 12 years. Much due to my wife and daughter, I like the FATHER job day by day because it, though sometimes making people heartbroken, makes me on top of the world more often! I am sure I will finally reach a crossed path with my father. And then, the two fathers will become friends once and for all.