Recently I met three friends who had recently lost their respective Dad’s. I got this unexplainable, painful feeling something which was full of fear, guilt, insecurity, love and immense respect. May be I should not be writing this but well I am so please take it as a wake up call for those who are fortunate enough to have their fathers around than as a sympathy note to those who have gone through the most excruciating pain of their lives because nothing can put them at ease.
Even though none of them spoke about it openly and all of them tried to not show their emotion and put up a rather brave face ,I could probably feel the pain which was nothing if compared to their's but still was piercing enough for me to realize one thing.
One’s Dad is probably the most important Man in his /her life and even though we meet many remarkable men in our life who can come in any form; brothers, friends, bosses, husbands, mentors and others but nothing can replace what one feels or should feel for his/her dad. I know most of us know this in the back of our minds but then that’s the back of our mind and that’s no place for Dad. He’s got to be up ahead in the front seat.
Come to think of it he is the man who has shaped the very us from inside and a little from the outside, yes I know for some of us what our fathers did is a distant memory because we moved out of our homes to make a man out of ourselves but remember that it was Dad who kicked our butt and probably said it for the first time “Grow Up, Be a Man, You Are Not A Kid Any More”. Our journey to be a man started from this comment of his and not with our first kiss or first smoke as we want to believe.
We could have turned in to kleptomaniacs if he wouldn’t have slapped us hard when we tried picking up that money lying on the Tv to play video games, we might have turned in to a junky if dad was smoking up all the time and gave us our first joint and said nothing beats marijuana son or may be a even a women abuser if dad didn’t love mom the way he did, for some reason he did it all right till we grew up and became opinionated.
And that’s important it was we who grew up not him he didn’t grow old, he is still the same guy who bravely faced our Math’s teacher after your super performance (read Crap), he is still the guy who knocks of at 10 while our life starts at midnight, he still likes his morning chai and newspaper while we have started having random whiskey mornings. He thinks of us, calls us, talks about us every single day while most of us wait for his birthday or fathers day.
Everything he did or everything he said or didn’t say somewhere impacted our life and we need to remind ourselves of it every single day.
Call up don’t wait for fathers day, he is waiting , if you have nothing to say just say I love u …
