Love letter to my late father

My father died ten years ago.

My father died ten years ago, and to this day it seems to me that it didn’t really happen. It’s a strange feeling, isn’t it? He’s dead, buried, and still sometimes I feel like calling him to ask for advice, I still have his number saved in my phone, and I’m often ready to draw it to tell him about my day or hear from him. .

The years have gone by, and even though the pain isn’t as sharp as it could be, the miss, this hollow in the middle of my chest is still there, very present.

Since I have a little girl and she too is lucky enough to have a father, this hole seems less deep to me. I became a mom, my boyfriend is a dad, we are parents in turn and the world kept turning.

But this evolution does not stop me to always be, too, my father’s little girl. And what kind of father was he, if you knew…

My father, this genius

This week, with all the commercials going around Father’s Day, I couldn’t help but think about him even more. Every time I get an email saying ” this Sunday, think about spoiling your father! », the pain awakens, the absence widens and my stomach twists.

To tell you a little about him, my father was a true genius, in the proper sense of the term. Gifted in mathematics, graduated from prestigious schools, he had a curriculum that could not fit on a single page, so rich and exciting had his career been.

He had been an aeronautical engineer, a professor of economics at the University of Lille, he had traveled the world several times, he had lived for years in Peru and Bolivia in order to create ingenious systems to bring drinking water to villages that did not have access to it.

This was for the official version.

But his last jobs before retirement, I didn’t really know about them. He was a kind of matchmaker between important people, he brought together diplomats, politicians, leaders.

I never knew more, because it didn’t mean anything.

My father, this discreet man who has lived a lot

my father was a reserved person, almost shyhe never dwelt on his life, his childhood, his past.

He was born in 1933, he married my mother at 36, it was quite rare for the time to get married so late. He had known hunger during the war, the beatings of his alcoholic father, the sound of bombing and that of German boots on the pavement echoing through the streets.

He had known fear hiding during the air raids that destroyed the buildings around the boarding school where he grew up, he had led troops during the Algerian War, he had almost been shot for refusing to send his men to kill others, he had been saved in extremis from bullets.

He had seen almost every country in the world, he had lived in South America at the time of the rise of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.

my father was a history book, a whole library of memorabilia that he spoke little about, for modesty and secrecy. But when he did, we hung on his lips, we were so fascinated by what he said, he who had lived up close the great events that made our history, he who had personally met emblematic characters of the world, whose biographies can be read today.

My father was extraordinary, simple, of rare intelligence and sensitivity. He always kept an eye on my news; towards the end of his life, we could spend hours on the phone discussing everything that made up the world around me.

Era deeply good, benevolent and funnyand it was more than a crutch I could lean on, it was my whole leg.

My father and I didn’t always work out

If my father was all that and more, he also had his weaknesses.

My mother also died when I was younger, I had just turned 13. She occupied a lot of space in our family, and above all her place; Why he was, before he died, only slightly presentphysically and mentally.

He traveled a lot for work, and was of the older generation: for him it was my mother who had to raise us, while he worked all over the world. And even though he also worked hard, he was our point of reference, the pillar that kept the family together. My father talked about his experiences and his salary, but he was never there, or almost.

When she died, our whole family fell apart. My brother and sister had both come of age and lived away from home, and I found myself alone with a father I didn’t know and who didn’t even know meall against the backdrop of a rather tough adolescent crisis given the events.

And my father was unable to raise me in turn, he preferred to make the choice that others do my education in his place, sending me to boarding school, like him at the same age.

Suffice it to say, the pill did terribly for me. Already abandoned by my mother, brother and sister, I was also abandoned by my father. That’s how I saw things. To me he was just a coward.

I learned much later that he had made this choice, because he was in a deep depression after his wife’s death, and that he didn’t want me to see him. He thought about suicide every day when he woke up in the morning, he couldn’t do it, he was beyond his strength.

For him, leaving me was a way to protect me, when I saw it as a rejection. It took us years to talk about it and to forgive each other. He wasn’t a coward, he was clumsy. He wasn’t just my father, he was a human being, with his weaknesses.

My father and his battles with the disease

Two years after my mother’s death from a cancerous brain tumor, it was my father’s turn to undergo chemo and radiation therapy. He developed his first skin cancer which ate his entire ear and had to be operated on.

The consequences of this cancer were also physical: the doctors had to cut off a piece of his ear and a facial nerve. He was then paralyzed in half of the face.

He called himself the “broken face” and made fun of his particular appearance, to better live with it. He who had never been ill in his life, paid the consequences of his travels in the Andes without sun cream for years, with this skin cancer that disfigured him.

After multiple relapses and remissions for more than ten years, her cancer ended up affecting her stomach, her liver, and then spreading all over the place. Nine years ago, a few months before his death, he announced to us that he was going to stop chemotherapy, that onehe couldn’t take it anymore.

He didn’t want to end up like my mother, lying on a medical couch and dependent on the medical profession for food and transportation. He didn’t want implacability, he didn’t want us, his children, to see him die as we had seen our mother die for so many long months.

My father and his last wishes

What a warrior he had been all those years and for the rest of his life! My father wanted rest, he wanted peace, and he couldn’t be blamed for fighting so well.

So he isolated himself, with his new partner, at his house, near the Atlantic coast, while I lived in Paris. I was last able to see him in November, when he could still walk, and he died in March. I had no right to see him before his death, I respected his last wish.

He had chosen for me, he wanted me to keep an image of him standing up and not lying down and reduced, and I respected that. I was able to talk to him up to his last moments by telephone, even if the last days before his death he could only listen to me, no longer having the strength to speak.

He wanted me to keep telling him what was happening in my daily life and I tried to keep a cheerful voice, trying to find stories to tell him, he who wanted to know everything about my daily life.

The day he passed, I was relieved. Not for me, I was devastated you can imagine, but for him. He finally got the peace he wantedhe had finally gotten rid of this crab eating his innards, he was done with his life, he needn’t worry anymore.

My father and his legacy

Nine years later, the pain of his death is less intense, because I remember him more alive and happy. Since I became a mother, I think of him with nostalgia, I repeat it oftenhe would have been so happy to meet his granddaughterand that reciprocity would be the same.

He could have taught my daughter to light a fire like an adventurer, to recognize all the paw prints of wild animals in the forest, to build tree houses with a few planks, to be indignant when a cause touched her, to rebel when necessary, to make your voice heard, which matters as much as that of others.

She could have taught him what she taught me that made me who I am, but that will never be the case. Luckily it’s my legacy and I can pass it on to my daughter like he did to me.

That’s all, my father’s legacy, that and my values. It is his courage, his tolerance, his kindness and his determination that he took the time to pass on to me and which I am trying to pass on to his granddaughter.

My father died nine years ago and is still present in my life, in my choices and in my thoughts. When I doubt, I always wonder what he would do in my place or what he would recommend.

It took him and I years to get to know and appreciate each other for who we were. But our relationship was exceptional, unique and sublime. He was my father and he was my friend, and he lives on through me, through my daughter, and through everyone who was lucky enough to know him.

So happy birthday, my dad. Hasta always.

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