It’s around 6:30 p.m. on an early December evening. I am 43 years old and I am sitting at the kitchen table on a Friday night. I have just returned from work and the chill of a west coast winter has burrowed into my bones. I am leaning into the heat generated by the baseboard heater against the wall.
Bright headlights flash on the blinds of the front window; it is my neighbour returning home from work in his orange and white branded truck and the headlamps have hit the window because he is reversing into the parking spot that faces our duplex.
And for a moment, I am 13 years old again sitting in my father’s home in Kengeleni and it is just before midnight. The lights that are flashing against the window are from his Range Rover as the car comes up the dark driveway and he returns home after an afternoon playing cricket at Mombasa Sports Club and an evening of heavy carousing with women and alcohol. It is a Wednesday night , what my father would call baby Saturday: a mini version of a weekend night built into the middle of the weekday to legitimize a raucous night out.
I blink and I am back in our home on a damp and wintry December night. I can hear the comforting sound of an electric kettle coming to a boil in the kitchen behind me and I can smell the sour and spicy fragrance of the yoghurt-based kadhi heating on the stove for supper. Physically I can register all of these warm, comforting sounds and smells but my stomach is still in knots – my body anchored in a 30-year old memory – and I can feel a knot of anxiety, apprehension, and fear unfurl and set my blood racing.
I am anxious that my father has returned home and I am still awake. I am apprehensive that he will see something as he walks into the house and that it will be a trigger. I am frightened – no, terrified – that he will start a verbal argument attacking my mother, that my sister and I will jump to her defence, but that we will lose our tempers and a little bit more of our selves tonight.
It was 4 years ago on November 22 that my dad passed away but like the memory of those headlights flashing against the window glass, my memories of my childhood – my anger at him, my resentment for his selfish behaviours, my regrets for how my relationship with him ended – are still too fresh and too close to the surface.
I try to hold onto the good memories, the soft ones and rationally, as a grown up, an adult, I know that he probably regretted many things that he did in his life – that less of it was premeditated and more of it defined by weakness because he was human, that the mistakes he made were likely an inability to speak out and choose the difficult road, that when he made choices he didn’t know what the final outcome would be – but the child in me cannot tamp down the emotion or the feeling that in the big picture he failed me as a parent. Or resolve a deep-seated feeling that I have spent too many years cleaning up his mistakes, and making right his wrongs. And the bitter sweet reflection there is that he prepared me to do just that: he gave me a god education, made me independent, taught me to be kind-hearted but strong-willed.
Now that he is gone:
- I hear his voice in my head saying my name as no one else in the world does – the longer double vowel at the start, the muted vowel in the middle.
- I remember how gentle he was when tending a wound on the back of my knee as an 8-year old, faithfully applying fresh ointment and changing the bandage daily until it had healed.
- I reminisce about how he told my sister and I that he had two broad shoulders – one for each of us to rest our heads on when we needed refuge.
- I see the clothing tags he prepared for us when we were leaving for boarding school mashing our names into one, creating a joint identity for the two of us.
We were three: my father, my sister and me. Three: my favourite number. There was so much love. He was our father; we were his children. And then in one drunken night, he spat his secret in our faces and told us that he had another family, another child in another city: a most beloved son.
Everything crumbled that night. Unsure of who I was anymore and what I had done to deserve that ultimate rejection, I lost myself and I lost my ability to trust.
I sleepwalked through the next few decades shrouded in confusion, hurt and betrayal and I gravitated towards married men who were nearly 15 years older than me looking for a replacement when what I was really looking for was a father. The first time, sure iI can shrug that off as a mistake. The second time, it was a pattern. A self-destructive, and an incredibly selfish, one.
My relationship with my father has stained and disfigured every other relationship that I have had: my mother, my sister, the different men who have come and gone.
My father still comes to me in my dreams. Vivid ones. Some I remember and in them I am arguing with him. Others I don’t remember as well. But after all of them I wake up knowing that he was in my dreams with me and that there is something he is trying to tell me. I know that in death he sees my pain and my suffering – perhaps more so than he did while he lived, or he hid it better then.
I wake up and I say a prayer for his soul, and I try to convince myself that I have forgiven him because anger cannot, should not, survive death.
Island Intrigue 