What my father gave me

With time, good memories return, says this writer about losing her father as a teen

There was nothing extraordinary about the day my father died. We woke up, went to college and left our parents to their work. It was February, and the air had that crispness that made you want to stand still and just breathe. I recall coming home from college, and finding an empty house; my friend pulling up in an auto-rickshaw, saying “Hurry up, your dad’s in hospital”. In the days before mobile phones there was no other way to get the news to me. By 4 pm that day, my dad had died. He was only 45. I watched from outside the ICU’s glass doors as nurses desperately tried to save him. He was in a coma, a result of him being admitted for ‘routine’ tests. The doctors said it was a heart attack; we suspected medical negligence. My mother and siblings huddled with me. My friend was still with us, along with a priest from the nearest church I had managed to get for the last rites. I vividly remember disturbing him from his siesta, apologising for my father who was dying at an inconvenient time. I remember the tears coursing down my cheeks as I pleaded with him, incoherent, trying to make him understand that there was no time to waste. All that was forgiven, as we watched my father die. I was 18 that year, the oldest of three siblings. As a self-obsessed teen, I don’t remember having long conversations with him. Maybe my memory fails me but my mother was a more present, constant figure while daddy was the fun guy, easy going and laid back.