My Dad

I hope to offer you many kinds of blogs ranging from ecstatically happy or maybe funny to some of the saddest times in my life. I hope to offer you my pondering's on things taking place in my world.  I hope to give you insight on my hopes and dreams, on where I am living and how I am living. I hope to offer you seriousness and silliness.

The first blog I give you is not a happy one. On the contrary it is probably one of the saddest I will ever write but it is my hope that it will help you begin to get to know the life, the heart, the mind of this person who is Noor.

The following is a descriptive essay I wrote for a class I was taking in 2002. I have rewritten it with a few minor modifications for this blog. It is a short story. It is about my dad.

My Dad

As I sit here in the uncomfortable straight-backed chair in room 110 at the hospital, I am watching my father sleep. It is not a contented and peaceful sleep but a fitful, unrewarding kind of sleep that comes out of desperate need and the use of medications. So very different than the kind of slumber one has when going to sleep at the end of a hard days work, ready for and in need of rest. As I watch him I can’t help but think back to when he and I were much younger than we are now. How handsome my dad was. I can see him now, standing there on the springboard with his strong arms held upward, pointing forward, clasped together just at the fingertips, head down in the proper position as he gets ready to do a perfect dive into the deep end of our kidney shaped pool. His back is long and straight, his legs muscular, strong and perfectly aligned with his feet placed together, ankles touching. He is a lean man who has the most stunning, natural, tawny brown skin. But his skin is tanned to an even deeper tone of brown with golden hues from all the hours outside in the pool. His hair, which is coal black, is wet and shimmering in the sun as he gets ready to dive. He is not a very big man standing only about 5 foot-5 inches tall but to me he is huge. He is the biggest man I have ever seen. Not because of his stature but because of who he is. He was my hero when I was a child. He is still my hero.

My dad taught backyard swim lessons in his spare time. Among his many students were two of my sisters and myself. My older sister was about as graceful as the proverbial bull in the china closet. However, when she went from dry land into water the most extraordinary thing would happen and she became the most graceful, angelic creature I had ever seen. She learned everything about swimming quickly and easily and to this day she loves-more than loves, she has a passion for swimming. Then there was my little sister. She, like me, was terrified of the water and was fearful to get in past her ankles. She learned though with my dad’s patient teaching and guidance and she developed a real enjoyment for swimming. And then there was me. I was afraid to get in the water, afraid to put my face in the water, afraid to let go of the coping (the tile that outlines the pool all the way around it), afraid to try to float on my back, afraid to float on my stomach. I was frightened of every aspect of swimming, just sure I was going to drown even if my dad was right there with me. Yet, after two full rounds of classes, many tears on my part and quite possibly my  father’s, he taught me how to swim. To this day I  don’t really care a lot for swimming but I am an extremely competent swimmer. So many times throughout my life I have been the fortunate recipient of my father’s choice to practice great love and patience.

My sisters and I had very different upbringings because of the different situations in our home. Some good but unfortunately some were not so good. My father treated us girls all very differently, trying hard to teach and love us in the way we would best respond to. I must admit though that I was favored. Being obviously favored by my dad, along with my mom impressing upon the other kids “Daddy loves her and not your baby sister, so we need to love your baby sister” made for a terrible and sad situation that built many walls between my dad and the other girls. It also provided the basis for numerous problems with all the other kids in the family and myself. The one other thing and the one good thing that this unfortunate state of affairs brought was a necessary and significant bond between my dad and I. We became extraordinarily close. Him reaching out to me, trying to protect me from the hurt the rest of the family imposed upon me and me reaching out to him because I honestly believed he was the only person in the world who loved me. This bond has ended up making for a life-long closeness that nothing, not time or circumstance has ever been able to intrude upon.

When I was twelve years old my parents’ marriage came to a not so peaceful end. Our lives were forever changed and the innocence of childhood was forever lost to all of us girls. We were suddenly thrown into a world of fighting, courtrooms and hatred that ran deep. That is another story though and not one I will go into at this time. I bring it up only to say that on my fourteenth birthday, the first day I could legally choose which parent I wanted to live with, I moved in with my now extremely sad, angry, lonely and broken father. The roles we had suddenly became reversed and instead of him protecting me and taking care of me, I now became the caretaker and defender. I lived with and cared for my father the rest of my growing up years and watched him turn into a shell of the man he had been when I was a child. He was still so loving and patient with me but he was not the same. I watched him go from an alive, vibrant man who enjoyed so much of life to a man who essentially just existed. I watched him change from a man who was full of the colors of life to a man who could best be described by the color brown, just brown. And now, I am watching him turn from brown to an ashen gray as he fights for his every breath. Many years have passed since I watched my dad get ready to jump off that springboard into our pool. Now he is seventy-nine years old and full of disease. His body is fighting against him in so many ways. I listen and watch as he fights for that next breath, panic coming into his eyes when he can’t find enough air and I want to scream “I’m scared Daddy! Make it better! Protect me!” I can’t though. I must stay silent. He can’t help me. Now I must practice the love and patience he practiced with me. I must hold his hand and tell him “it’s okay, don’t be scared, all will be well in the end.”

So I sit in this uncomfortable straight-backed chair in room 110 and I wait, wondering will this be the time he doesn’t go home ever again or will we have a little more time together? Wanting so selfishly, so desperately to have more time to love him and be loved by him but wanting just as desperately for him to pass away so he will not feel the fear of wondering how much longer it will be or how much more pain he will experience, so he will experience peace.

*An added note* My dad lived only about two and a half weeks after I wrote this. He slipped peacefully out of this world when Allah decided it was the right day, hour, moment.