I wanted to write about my father in time for last Sunday’s celebration of Fathers’ Day. But as I began to search my mind for memories of my late Tatay (Cebuano word for Daddy), a strong feeling of nostalgia overtook my thoughts. The long period I spent staring at the blank screen of my computer then brought in resentment, and then guilt!
By Archie Modequillo
My relationship with my Tatay was bittersweet. It was bitter for a very long time, and turned sweet only in his final days. The story I would have written would not have been very pleasant.
For many years I only had my gripes to say about my Tatay. He was not a perfect father. I took his personal failings as undermining my own prospects for advancement. I grew up not having a hero to live up to.
Then I realized I was not a perfect son, either. My father’s limitations could have been my inspiration and not my hindrance. It would have been enough for me that he was there, flawed but close at hand. I was the one who kept my distance!
Telling a story like that would only have contradicted the spirit of the public celebration of fathers. It would have reopened wounds that had already been healed, and the hurt I would now have to bear by myself – because my Tatay is no longer there to take the blame. It didn’t seem a good idea.
I opted to write about my friends, instead; stories that did not necessarily relate to fatherhood. My mind was deflected somehow, but just by a bit. Still, thoughts about my father lingered.
Tatay and I became very good friends in the end – but only after he said sorry. He didn’t mean to cause me any pain, he told me in a quivering voice. I believed him; the sincerity of his apology penetrated my soul and soothed my aching heart.
I wasn’t by his side when my Tatay passed away. But it didn’t matter. We had become the best of friends, forever.
Curiously, after six years I still don’t feel I have lost my father. I don’t miss Tatay so much to the point of feeling sad, the way you feel when thinking of a deceased loved one. When I think of Tatay now, I smile; often teary-eyed but smiling, feeling certain that he has not left completely.
In a way, my father’s death has awakened in me an innate emotional knowledge that I will never cease being my parents’ child, notwithstanding my rebelliousness, my pride, my wrongs and excesses. That even if I stay away, blame them or hate them, they remain there, heart and mind longing for my return.
One day I will come home. My Tatay will be there, waiting to introduce me to the greatest father of all – the Perfect Father that I was looking for in the wrong person back here. Then I shall have found eternal joy, coming face to face at last with the Father whose immense outpouring of love sets the entire universe in exact order, for me and for all His children. And it will be my biggest shame if I do not at least begin to know Him here, now. (E-MAIL: modequillo@gmail.com)