Sonhood

It was past midnight when I opened my door, headed for the kitchen and found my father sitting alone in the living room popping medication. A newly acquired cough had woken him from his slumber.

There is a rather potent flu bug in the air. My brother, among many, many others, caught it sometime back and was unfit to work for days. It evolved into a racking cough that kept him up at night for weeks to come.

Somehow the sight of father coughing struck a cord.

What came as a common occurence should not have caused any response. But somehow, this is different. For a split second, I was at a lost. And it was followed by a sense of confusion as I tried decipher my feelings.

It plagued me for hours...

A distant object of perfection suddenly seemed so intimate and suddenly fragile. The facade of a seemingly indestructible, invincible figure for the past twenty eight years is suddenly shattered in an instant, leaving a vacuum impossible to fill. Somehow the father figure is no longer what it used to be. And if the father is no longer what it is, then what is the son?

If the father is no longer the father, the son cannot be the son.

I suddenly felt as if the ground that I stand had fell away.

All my achievements came relatively easy for me, or cost me relatively little. While I had worked hard for them, I never thought I deserve the things that I have now. I was feel grateful, blessed and lucky; grateful, but not enough.

Somehow I forgot that I should feel lucky and blessed to have my family.

In this culture of meritocracy, it is often so easy to forget the people or the things that had made all these possible. I forgot that whatever I have thought to be my personal achievements would never have been possible if had no roof over my head or food for my voracious appetite.

If ideal children are to be seen and not heard, I am not half as bad. I am seldom seen and seldom heard, since I am seldom home. And I have always hidden myself behind the role of a son taught to me since childhood.

Things are simpler that way. But nothing is the same anymore. And it is time to learn the duties of a son at adulthood.

I do not reckon it will be long before I step into his shoes to carry what he has shouldered for the past 40 years. And I am not confident if I can do the same. I am not sure I can perform as well, for in more ways than one, I am still finding my way around. I am not sure if I am ready.

But it is time to learn, and fast.

Things have changed, and things will.

But I am his son, and that will not.

Walking past him, trying my best to be nonchalant, I patted the cane chair that he was sitting on, and told him to rest and take care of himself.

Next time, I will pat him on his back.