Crimson Heavens

I had just received an SMS from my sister in the Philippines telling me that my father passed away. She also got the news from my brother in the US and he was there when it happened. 

I am not going to write about things I had missed about him, there was nothing to miss, he was rarely there… our interactions were too short…almost insignificant that it was not even painful considering the circumstances. It was as if he was just someone I knew, someone I called “Daddy” but never really saw him as one. I can even count the number of days, if I try to sum all those hours up, that I had been with him in that 26 years of my life. 

Although I have heard from my sister and my half-siblings that I was very much like him in some ways, I never really saw how. I never knew him enough. I never tried to get to know him enough, and I don’t think he knew me enough too. Of course he had told me that he was proud of me, of how smart I was and all that, that I turned out well after all, even without him…He even joked that if I wanted a break as a script writer he can always call all those people he knew in the movie industry (He was a director and a script-writer too), I guess, thinking back, he was probably even serious about the offer. I turned him down of course, not for anything, just because I knew that I am not good enough to do it.

As I said, he wasn’t much of a father to me, and I never really demanded anything more of him, nor I have blamed him for anything that he had done or had not done. There were special moments in my life that I had asked him to come and share it with me, just because I should ask, not that I really, really would want him there…Of course he never came, and I never expected him to.

All my life, I knew him as my father, but only after hearing the news of his passing, did I really feel that he was.  

Goodbye Daddy.