by Ascen Arriazu

Created on: June 13, 2008

When dad left I understood how much I was going to miss him.

I had imagine life without him for many years and yet, when it really happened, I realised I was not ready for it! My life was always lived around his desires, his lack of determination to get them himself and his excesive love. He loved me with the intensity of a stalker, denying me even the freedom to breath my own air, to make my own mistakes. His obsesive love marked my whole existance and ruined my own relationships.

Now that he is gone, there is a very empty space in the part of my heart that he ocuppied. A very big empty space!

Dad was not perfect, but he was not the nasty man I used to see when he was alive. His death has helped me to understand his mistakes and his humanity. The same way, it taught me that selfdetermination does not start in others, the rest of the world is not responsible for my own mistakes, for my lack of courage, for my wasted time.

There were moments when I hated him, his way of living life through mine, but now that I look at him from an adult perspective... poor man, how much he must have suffered, just as much as I will for my own children. I pray everyday for having the inteligence to leave them alone.

Dad was never a great man, he was extremely inteligent but never had the chance to develop his potential. There were hard times back home and he was born a fighter without any tools to fight. He was always ill, diabetes took his life even before he left it, tired of the day to day battle he had to play. He was not loved in the way he could understand, nor by his mum neither by me, the two more important women in his life. How can I keep blaiming him for my miseries? But i'm afraid I do! simply because he could not use his common sense to comprehend that I was only a child, the same way he was only a child when granny demanded so much from him.

It is then true that generations repeat their mistakes, nothing new to show off, everything has already been writen, even the wrong steps we will take.

I must now congratulate myself, as I did something I had never dreamed of: forgive him.

His loss took me to that place in adulthood where reason wins heart and the arrival of my own children made me understand how hard everything was for him. How could I not see that before? Maybe if I had used that inteligence that I think I got from him, the inteligenc that for so many years, I blamed him for not using, if I had been as good as I pretended him to be, maybe then I would have forgive him in time to let him go in peace.

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