The Last Time I Saw My Father
Creative Nonfiction
The last time I saw my father was the year before he died. I did attend his funeral, but that man in the coffin wasn’t him. At least, I didn’t want to believe he was. He didn’t look like my father. A stranger lay there, pale and lifeless.
He looked old.
Like he could’ve been my grandpa. My mom said the autopsy doctor questioned if they made a mistake. Did somehow the paperwork got confused? Because this man appeared to be in his mid-sixties, inside and out. I totally agreed. They had to have made a mistake.
My father was only forty-eight.
He must have been alive, off on one of his work assignments. He probably was playing a game on me to trick me into coming home. I waited and waited for my father to appear. I imagined him opening the front door, in a deep voice saying something like, “I got you!”
He didn’t.
And the man lay in the coffin, and who knows where his family was. Did they even know he died?
On the morning of the funeral, the doctor from the neighboring village came and offered us, my mom and I, sedatives.
“I don’t need any,” I protested. “I don’t want my senses numbed, so I can’t feel. Give it to my mother. She needs it but not me,” I told him.
Her mother just died three months ago, and two days later, her only brother, the doctor knew. I didn’t want to tell him that my father was not dead, and I wanted to be sharp in my mind when he suddenly ends this charade of a funeral. I didn’t trust him. I mean, I didn’t trust the doctor. When I was fourteen, he fondled my breast on an annual exam and asked me if any secretions of milk come out of them. Why? I wasn’t breastfeeding or sexually active. I didn’t even get my period yet. But I didn’t say anything more than, “No, nothing comes out of them.”
I sometimes admire my strength to speak up and the outrage I could feel in terms of injustice at an early age. By my teenage years, my father and his parents had snuffed it out almost completely. I sometimes wonder what could’ve been. How my life would’ve turned out if I didn’t need to fight that inner voice—the one that said I was not worthy, that I did not matter—and didn’t need to inch my way back to assertiveness. If only it had grown within me since the first time I had declared my dislike of unfair treatment, and I had corrected some misstated facts. Since that time, when I stood up to my father and said, “You brought me into this world and should take care of me because I didn’t ask to be born.”
No one does.
Babies come into the world entitled to be taken care of, fed, cleaned, and cuddled. They instinctively ask for their needs to be met by crying. Then as they grow—and if they encounter people like my father—they slowly begin to understand that nothing is to be given to them freely. That they truly don’t deserve anything. Not even respect. They are nothing and worth nothing, and they could only have a life and a say outside of their father’s house.
I absorbed those lessons growing up—the constant put-downs, the threat of violence, verbal, emotional, and on occasion, physical abuse. It took years to learn to be assertive again by reading countless self-help books and by years of counseling. I found mentors who held me up when I was on the verge of falling into letting people walk all over me again.
A couple of years ago, I took a writing class at a nearby college. We had to write three short stories, fiction. But, I based my stories on my life. Real events.
“Wow, Veronika’s life seems horrible, a little too much. Why would she forgive her father at the end?” my professor said.
So I talked to him after class and revealed my secret, I was Veronika. I forgave because that is what you do when somebody hurts you.
My sister and I, as children, cried helplessly while our father beat our mom. To flee from the fights at night, we joined her hiding high up on the cherry tree, sleeping under the rose bush, and within the dried stalks of corn. Yet this man was my father. And you have to love your father, no matter what.
You just do.
You only have one, and you must find the thing that he has that’s good in him. If you’re lucky, maybe you even find two as I did. Then you can say, “My father was an alcoholic and abused the people closest to him, but he was intelligent, and he had integrity.” The two I’s that became so important to me in search of my man.
He must possess these, Integrity and Intelligence—yes with capital letters—should never use alcohol to numb emotional pain, as my father did. Should keep his hands off me, except for hugging and gentle touching, of course—that I always welcome.
This is something I teach my sons: You got to find something in your father that you can admire. There’s something good in everyone.
The last time I saw my father alive was the day I had left to live in the US. We sat together on my bed, and I could see tears in his eyes as he said, “I’m sorry for not being good to you, but I love you.”
There were more words, but I can’t recall them all, I just remember the feeling they gave that stayed with me all throughout my life. That my father and I finally built a bridge, a father and daughter pair should share. That my father knew he had let me down, but he loved me and wanted me to turn out well despite his lack of skilled parenting. He wished me well, and he was proud of who I’d become.
1st Published in Spark, a print literary journal, on May 2nd, 2018.
The Author
Izabelle Cassandra Alexander was born and raised in a little village in Hungary. After immigrating to the US, she first lived in New York. There she graduated Summa Cum Laude with a Bachelor’s in Information Systems from Monroe College before moving to Chicago, where she earned her MBA in Business from Webster University.
In 2013, Izabelle refocused to pursue her life-long dream of writing and began taking writing classes at Oakton Community College and online. Since then, she’s been a member of numerous writing and poetry groups, attending workshops and conferences, continuously updating her writing and editing skills. She’s a single mother. Nature and animal lover.
Izabelle writes short stories, creative nonfiction essays, flash fiction, plays, and poetry. Also, she’s currently working on a few novels and a series of children’s books along with illustrations.
Publications
Several of her fiction, creative nonfiction essays, and poetry have been published by in Spark, a print literary journal, in 2016, 2018, and 2019, and forthcoming in 2020, as well as by The Scarlet Leaf Review on their website in 2018 and in their March 2020 issue. By the Illinois State Poetry Society (ISPS) on their website in 2017, 2018, and in the ISPS print anthology, Distilled Lives, Volume 4, 2018. Also, in Yearning to Breathe, a print anthology by Moonstone Art Center, 2019. By WOW! Women on Writing, 2019 & 2020, in The Book Smuggler’s Den, 2019, by Tint Journal, 2020, in Ariel's Dream Literary Journal, 2020, Unlimited Literature Magazine (UL-Mag), 2020, forthcoming by Ariel Publishing on their website & in Literary Excellence in 2020, and more.
Honorable Mentions, Runner Up, and Finalist
She won Runner Up status with her flash fiction “Fragments of Bones” in a contest by WOW! Women on Writing in 2019, and with her creative nonfiction essay "Why I Hate Yellow Peas" in April 2020. An interview was published by WOW in The Muffin on January 14, 2020, and another one forthcoming in June. Her creative nonfiction essays “Disciplined Discipline” (2017) and “My First Camel Ride” (2019), and her flash fiction “Invisible Love” (2018), “Drowning Under Pressure” (2020), and “Yellow Carnations” (2020) each received an Honorable Mention in contests by WOW! Women on Writing while they chose many of her flash and creative nonfiction pieces as finalists.
In The New York City Midnight Challenge Flash Fiction Contest, she won the first round within her tier with her flash fiction titled “What Eyes Can’t See” in 2018. Several of her poems, fiction, creative nonfiction essays, and plays had been selected by Oakton Community College over the last six years as a finalist to represent them in the annual Skyway Competitions (eight community colleges competing).
To Reach Her
You can find Izabelle on her website: izabelle2012.wixsite.com/Izabelle
Connect with her on Facebook: fb.me/E.IzabelleAlexander and Twitter.com/IzabelleAlexan3
Support her work on Patreon at www.patreon.com/IzabelleAlexander
Such an open and honest piece. It took courage to share this deeply personal essay. 🌹