Days Before Me

Who chooses where they start?

Lately I've become suspicious of a world obsessed with that question.

Trauma has become a language. A currency. A marketplace.

People trade stories of suffering the way merchants trade livestock. The worse the wound, the louder the applause.

Open up. Share. Heal. Connect.

As if every scar exists to be displayed beneath fluorescent lights.

But whenever I hear people speak so confidently about pain, I think of the Parable of the Sower.

The seed never chooses where it lands.

Not on the path. Not among rocks. Not among thorns. Not in fertile soil.

Yet we spend our lives judging the harvest.

The successful congratulate themselves.

The broken search for explanations.

The rest of us stand somewhere in between, wondering whether we are the seed or the ground.

Maybe that's why I've never known what to do with my own story.

Not because I don't remember, but because I remember too much.

At eighty-two, remembering becomes its own punishment.

The years ahead become fewer than the years behind.

The house is full.

Children.

Grandchildren.

Great-grandchildren.

Yet all I can see is an empty chair.

My youngest daughter should be here.

Her son too.

Seven years.

That is how long it has been since I last saw my grandson.

Funny thing about families. They rarely break from a single event.

A crack appears. Then another.

People apologize. People forgive.

Life moves on.

Until one day you realize nobody has spoken in years.

There was a misunderstanding.

At least that is what everyone calls it. The apologies were made. Yet something remained.

Seeds grow. Even bitter ones.

The music grows louder.

Children laugh.

I smile when expected.

But one question follows me through the celebration.

Will I see that boy again before I die?

Funny thing about loss.

The people who leave rarely leave alone.

They take entire futures with them.

No parent should bury a child.

Everything else, a man can survive.

My firstborn was supposed to carry the family forward. Then God called him home. The burden passed to his brother.

That is how life works. Or at least how it used to.

People today dislike words like duty, responsibility, obligation.

I don't care.

A man provides.

A man protects.

A man leaves the house stronger than he found it.

That is the contract I spent my life honouring.

Yet here I sit, closer to the grave than the cradle, wondering whether I failed.

My son has a son.

A bright boy.

But I do not know whether father and son are connected by anything beyond blood.

A tree with weak roots does not collapse immediately.

Sometimes, it waits a generation.

My son found a remarkable woman.

Strong enough to lead. Wise enough to support.

Many men spend entire lives searching for such a wife.

He stumbled into one.

You can build walls.

Provide food.

Protect everyone from the storm.

And still fail to stop the rain from getting inside.

I spent years standing in that rain.

Years mistaking survival for living.

I was always my father's daughter.

My mother and I, however, never found our footing.

My father could punish you and somehow make you feel loved.

My mother could punish you and leave you wondering what you had done wrong.

Maybe memory sharpens certain edges.

Maybe not.

Either way, when I met my husband, I mistook familiarity for safety.

Brother, sister-in-law, mother, they all warned me.

I married him anyway.

What followed were years of apologies disguised as marriage.

Years of surviving.

Years of returning to my parents carrying bruises nobody could see.

Then my father died.

For the first time in my life, I felt exposed.

Like someone had removed the roof during a storm.

The only thing that kept me moving was my son.

Everything I couldn't save in myself, I tried to save in him.

Perhaps too much.

Parents swear they are protecting their children.

Sometimes they're only teaching them fear.

When he disappeared, I told people he needed space.

The truth?

Every night I imagined police officers at the door, or a hospital, or a morgue.

Three years away.

Then he came back.

The strange thing wasn't that he returned.

It was who returned.

The boy who left carried anger.

The man who came back carried distance.

The same distance that existed between me and my mother.

Recognition frightens me.

More than regret ever did.

I am sixty-seven years old and I’ve have spent most of that time waiting for tomorrow to rescue me from today.

It never did.

I am a husband who humiliated his wife.

A father who failed his son.

A man who chose the bottle whenever reality became inconvenient.

People say regret is painful.

They're wrong.

Regret is easy.

Recognition is what kills.

Recognition is waking up one day and realizing everyone who warned you was right.

Recognition is hearing your own son speak and wondering when he stopped needing you.

Recognition is understanding that you have become a cautionary tale.

And the cruelest part?

The part that scares me?

My son may spend his entire life trying not to become me.

Long after we're gone, memory keeps speaking for us.

Sometimes louder than we ever did.

The earliest memory I have is standing on a balcony.

Just standing there.

Looking down.

Not scared.

Not thinking.

Just standing.

My entire life people introduced me through other people.

Son of.

Grandson of.

Nephew of.

I became a family tree before I became a person.

Growing up, I watched my father choose strangers over family.

I watched my mother confuse fear with protection.

I watched my grandparents carry convictions so heavy they bent beneath them.

Everyone was trying to save something.

A marriage.

A legacy.

A child.

A reputation.

No one seemed to notice what those efforts cost.

People often tell me I look like my father.

Every time they do, my blood turns cold.

Not because I hate him, but because I understand him.

That is what terrifies me.

For years I believed my greatest challenge was avoiding his mistakes.

Avoiding his habits.

Avoiding his life.

But lately another possibility has begun haunting me.

What if I succeed?

What if I spend so much time running from him that I never discover who I am?

A few months ago, an elderly man stopped me outside a shop.

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then smiled.

"Have we met before?" he asked

"No." I responded

But he kept staring.

The way people stare when memory and reality overlap.

Eventually he nodded and walked away.

I knew what he had seen.

Not me.

My father.

The strange thing is, moments like that no longer make my blood run cold.

What frightens me now is something else.

For years I believed my greatest challenge was avoiding his mistakes.

I built entire versions of myself around that mission.

Every decision.

Every friendship.

Every ambition.

Every escape route.

Not him.

Not him.

Not him.

The problem with building yourself around an absence is that eventually you have to fill the space.

And I don't know if there's anything there.

My grandmother is waiting for reconciliation.

My grandfather is waiting for continuity.

My mother is waiting for certainty.

My father is waiting for redemption.

And me?

I think I've spent so long trying not to become someone else that I never became anyone at all.