I was sick for most of October, and because I was coughing incessantly, that meant IT WAS PEI PA KOA TIIIIIIME.
I like to joke that taking Pei Pa Koa when you have a cough or a sore throat is the best advice he ever gave me. Okay, I say “joke” but I’m … not really joking. We didn’t have the best relationship. It took me a couple of years after he died to really think about why that was: we were both pretty stubborn, he wasn’t around much and let my mother take care of us, I didn’t like the way he treated my mother and how he favored his siblings, and he probably really didn’t want to or was prepared to be a father and never learned along the way. That’s all fine now. There’s really not much I can do about stuff that happened a long time ago with a parent who died more than a decade ago.
So no, I don’t have very many warm memories of my father. But I do hang on to the few I have:
- him bringing me a box of cookies* that ended up becoming my favorite
- waking me up from a nap to tell me that we have Japanese corn for merienda
- him joking that he was just holding a piece of chalk when I chided him for smoking
- his excitement when he passed an important professional exam
- him thanking me for giving him what turned out to be one of his last meals
- his anticipation over delivering a speech pushing for automation in his workplace
None of them seem like a lot, but I imagine I would have seen more of those moments had we both taken the time to get to know each other better and stopped being so triggered by whatever the other one said. I know, the dead don’t care, but I’m still here and from time to time, I still wish things had been different.
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