Dead Man Walking
Uploaded by bebecha on Jun 20, 2004
Clad in a black velvet suit, I came out of the house, my eyes red and swollen and my heart in pain. I carried with me my father’s portrait. The embalmer upon seeing me told me to place the picture in the car’s front window pane. I did what he ordered me and proceeded to join the funeral march. The solemn music of “Amazing Grace� filled the air and the emptiness of my heart. I would have cried the instant that song played but I couldn’t… I would not dare to believe… I’m not going to tell to the rest of the world that I’ve lost my father… A great person I’ve lived with and lived for for 15 years.
Days after, I sat all by myself thinking on what’s happening with him. It was the end, right? But many people out of nowhere would pop out and tell me all sorts of things like he took the form of a butterfly and a lizard. I laughed at them, telling them that my father rests now in the bosom of the Father and that he’s not a part of this world anymore. I wouldn’t want to believe that he passed away but my heart tells me that it’s now a reality, that death can stab you at the back anytime. Though the pain still remains a hard rock on my heart, the memory I had of him made me accept my fate… Those long years I had of him took away the worry and fear, unlike others who never saw the light of death’s candle.
I got the greatest shock of my life when one of my aunts related to my family the story of my father getting back at her because of cigarette-smoking. Almost all my father’s siblings are cigarette smokers. When he got sick of cancer, he told my visiting aunts and uncles not to smoke anymore because it would ruin their lives and their family… One day, my father “invisibly lighted a cigar� in the living room. My two aunts were having their snacks adjacent to that room. A gushing wind simply made its entrance unto their nostrils and they smelled the “soothing cigarette fire�. No one and nothing could decipher where that smoke came from… Goose pimples covered their thin skins and horrific faces shattered their sunny smiles.
I started to question myself…I’m unbelieving in ghosts so I dared...