My Father Who Managed to Hide His Sorrows

and no, still NOT my photograph…

From the perspectives of the children here, translated…

The door bell rang, I just, stepped out of the kitchen, about to, answer, I’d heard my dad, saying hi to the visitors, it was, the couple that used to live next door.

I’d heard our neighbor’s wife told, “I’d heard about what happened to your wife………”, I thought, this, is AWFUL, I’d walked to the door, saw her, hugging my dad tight, said something consoling.  I saw my father, in tears, thanking her, wiping away his tears.

I was shocked, suspected, that if we had, ignored our father’s loss from the start.  I’d felt that pain inside of me, we’d thought wrong, for blaming dad, for being so cold.

Several years ago, mom had a surgery, after the surgery, my dad was, waiting outside the ward, with that panicked look on his face, couldn’t stop himself from crying, couldn’t step into the ward at all.

Back then, we’d started noticing, that my dad’s reaction toward my mom’s hospitalization seemed a bit, overboard.  From before, mom had surgery too, and, after she was out of the hospital, dad would, chauffeur her to and from work every single day, until she’d told him to stop, because she got annoyed.

This time, mom fell ill, for over a year, went into the hospitals multiple times, and when the nurses told us, that my mother’s conditions weren’t optimistic, that it may be the last time we get to see her alive, we rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night, I saw my father, pacing, outside of her hospital ward, and still hadn’t stepped in, to see her.

Later on, my mother died, at the funeral home, my dad still didn’t get to see my mom last time, and, this made us misunderstand.  The day that my mother’s urn was to be placed inside the urn tower, my father was extremely agitated, I saw that look that said “I don’t want to go”, I’d made an excuse for him, to stay at home, back then, I couldn’t understand how deep the loss, the sorrow was, for him.

And now, I’d found out, that my father had been, very quiet about his own emotions, or maybe, he’d felt, that in front of us, his kids, he needed to maintain his cool, and that, was why, there was no outlet, for his sorrows from losing my mom.  Seeing how my dad couldn’t stop crying as the neighbor hugged him, I’d felt like crying too.

And so, this, is how emotionally disabled men are, because of the way they were taught: grown men don’t cry, blah, blah, blah, and because of the cultural expectations of the male gender role too, this, is why this man couldn’t show HIS emotions for the loss of his wife, but, it all, crumbled down, and, the waterworks happened, because he’d held it in, for way, way, W-A-Y too long!