I guess you could say that my father was, for all intents and purposes, the King of Mistakes and Shortcomings. I never knew where he was the day I was born, was he beside my mother, was he outside smoking stick after sticks of month-old cigarettes found by accident inside one pocket of a trouser carelessly put on in the midst of frantic haste for my fast approaching arrival into the world. Or was he elsewhere, at work, in the arms of a different woman, at a friend's house completely wasted having after having consumed a proud ten bottles of rhum. He was mean, and violent, and warm, and sweet, and mysterious, and funny and solemn, and scary and quiet. Very quiet. He never said much. Except when he was drunk, which was most of the time. He talked, sometimes barked but mostly, he yelled at my brother, at me, at my mother, at the neighbors, at life. But no, he never said much.
He's dead now. From a combination of illnesses that didn't compliment each other, one being a complication of the other, the other being the cause of another. I read that piece of paper, that shabby, cheap sheet of paper that said what he died of from, that my mother broke her heart for another hundredth time when another woman also tried to get his death certificate. It was a jargon, the diagnosis, words that may sound so fatal and serious to ignorant ears, such as my mother's and my brother's. It shamed me, even as I was explaining to them that that man died from an otherwise preventable illnesses had he known what to do, had he not abandoned a family that would have accompanied him to monthly check-ups, had his daughter not hated him and stopped acknowledging his existence, when this daughter was a nurse.True, my father did very little good in his life, it is never easy to summon to mind fond memories of him. But he never failed to love me. That much I felt. He might not have known how to love me, but he did.
