Death. Hope. Life.
“I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens.” ― Woody Allen
I went there.
It was a Monday morning at 08:17 am. I emerged out of my hibernation and realised the school bell had already rang. I rolled out of my bed and galloped over to my mothers’ room shouting that we are late for school. The instant I entered her room, her red eyes and cheeks struck me. She was crying the whole night. “We’re late for school!?” I said. A Grade 3’s worst nightmare, walking into class late. She told me that I wouldn’t be attending school today because someone in our family has died last night. White coldness struck. I sprinted over to my grandmothers’ room, obviously in my eight year old brain she was the oldest and therefore was the obvious choice; she gazed at me from her bed, she was fine.
“Dis pappa.”
My mom told me that it’s my father who passed away in a car accident in Knysna. The tears were streaming even before she told who it was, but now it was heavy tears. For some unknown reason she told me to hit the pillow. I later realised that she had so much anger in her. Apart from these memories I don’t remember anything of the rest of that day, except for the feeling of waking up with painful red eyes.
13 May 2001. This is the date I will forever remember. As an eight year old I didn’t know what to do with the feelings I felt or even know the word “mourn” exist. Sometimes I wish I could re-do that day. That sounds weird, but as I went on with my life I blocked out everything I knew or could remember of my father and that day is sadly all I can remember of my father. That day’s tears are my only tangible memory of my father.
In the 13 years since that morning I haven’t gotten the courage to visit the accident scene. Until the past University class break. The questions in my heart these past couple of years in a way forced me to go to where his death happened. Questions that people my age ask (where is God?, How does He work? Or What happens after death?) started popping up since I started taking my studies seriously and in some sense I didn’t think my father could’ve helped me answer them, but me visiting the accident scene could just help me be O.K with what I was asking?
I stood there. There where it happened. It felt like a movie. There I was, alive, where my father spent his last minutes of life and his first of death. As I was walking to the cross, that my uncle had put up there, that weird sinking feeling of 13 May 2001 came back and I did something that I had forgotten to do for so long.
I wept.
It felt so good. It felt so real. Tangible. I felt free but also couldn’t escape from the moment. I wanted to stay there, in the moment, in the feeling. Captured in tangibility of a feeling. I saw the dried out flowers of previous people passing by and strangely two empty Black label bottles. I decided to leave them there seeing as whoever drank them probably drank them in commemoration of my dad and he hasn’t had a beer so close to him in about 13 years in any case.
I planted a Spekboom close by which refers to old and ugly things being transformed into good or beautiful things like the Spekboom does with the carbon it turns into oxygen and then sang a song I wrote especially for the occasion. Vere van my Vader (Feathers of my Father) is a song I wrote with the intention of one day maybe singing it at the accident scene. Its featured under the “writing life” link above.
The song describes in short how I feel when I think about my father. The name of the song refers to an image I have that I think of when I think about my father. I have this image of hands trying to capture a bird and as the hand is grabbing the bird it only manages to get some feathers in its hand. It’s not the whole bird, but it’s a part of it. That’s pretty much how I feel. I only have feathers left of my father’s life. I can’t remember a lot about him. Just what people have told me about him. These different “feathers” that I have been able to grasp is all I have of my father.
For some people they need to have the whole bird, but for me the feathers are enough to be content with.
In contrary to what I quoted from Woody Allen above, I was afraid of my father’s death, but then I went there (where it happened) and now I’m O.K with his death.
Here is the song I wrote: