A Life Lesson from the Death of My Father
Three years ago, may dad passed away. He was 76. Just three months earlier, her oldest sister, or my aunt, passed away first. She and her family was the closest extended family to me. I was blessed to be able to spend times with them during their last moments. I used to live out of town because of work. I remember that my dad was in a coma for 2 nights before passing away. I remember crying so hard knowing that he would go away soon. It felt unreal. My life would never be the same again.
When I was in my 20s, I was following what most of my peers were doing after university. Move to the capital city and get a good job. I got one in a multinational firm. What I saw is, everyone else seemed to sure what they were doing especially in the job and what they were striving towards, which was moving up in their career path. I never felt that it was something meaningful to me. I failed to see the essence of higher position in the office other than higher salary and influence over people in the job. It didn’t make sense to me to live my life like that. But on the contrary, I didn’t know how I should live my life. I didn’t know what I really wanted to do. And the truth is, the older I get, the more I realise that I’ve always been like this. Questioning what my purpose is, finding a place where I belong, always feeling unsure about what I should do next. It never feels right, it keeps bothering me wherever I am, and I never spoke about this with my parents — we didn’t talk much. But the truth is, the more I learn about my father after he died, the more I suspect that he had the same way of thinking as me (or the opposite). He told me over and over about he got “bored” of living in the same city for a couple of years so that he requested to his employer to get transferred to another city. I figured out that what he was feeling was not boredom, but more likely that “something didn’t feel right” and the feeling that he didn’t belong there. I now know that feeling.
I remember that once he told me something about communication. He told me that from all those years of his professional life, the hardest thing for him to do was to build communication with other people. I never thought of this as something deeper other than that he might be awkward in communicating despite the word “build” — that sounds like something more fundamental, don’t you think? He was rather a quiet person. However, after three years ago when I realised that I might be autistic, I was started to think that maybe what he actually meant was that he had difficulty in reading social cues, interpreting sentences and getting in the same direction in a topic when in conversation with other people.
The more I learn about myself and about him, the more I realise that we have many things in common. I wish that I had known myself better when he was still around so I can learn about him better, so that our lives can be spent better. The thing is, if you grow up with some neurological differences but remain undiagnosed, there’s a possibility that you have so many blind spots about yourself. You ended growing up thinking that you’re like other people, only a little weird. You’ve probably got questions about yourself that keep bothering you but you keep them to yourself because you’re thinking: sure, all people must have had those questions too. But no, other people don’t think like that.
Am I making any sense?
So, what I’m trying to tell you here is that while your parents are still around, now matter how distanced you are emotionally with them, learn about them. Maybe you’ll find that it turns out you have similarities with them more than you realise, so you can learn and improve your life, and improve your relationship with them.
