Memoirs of a dying man

The painful disclosure; how it all started…. If it wasn’t for this paralyzed left arm which I think is due to the intravenous injections the nurse has been digging inside me, am feeling much better compared to when I last wrote to you. Outside my window looks chilly with a mild and gentle breeze which makes the space outside pleasant to look at, how I wish I had enough strength to walk’ I would wander into the splendidly stretched meadows in the distance but for now am settling for only admiring the beauty I cant reach. It never occurred to me even once that a single letter could have a more subtle healing than what the doctors are actually providing, after the previous letter I wrote to you, a strange excitement gripped me and from then I knew its talking to you that my soul’ which is more wounded than the lungs under treatment, will be resuscitated. Today in the morning your mother looked more beautiful than I have ever seen her, I felt a strange guilt on looking at her, she looked hearty and truthful even there as she curiously entered the room; in her late twenties she still possessed the grace she had four years ago when I first met her in the bank queuing to deposit her tuition. I felt guilty because it felt I wouldn’t have been her at time to fall in love with me at such a time when I was a total wreck, a man who was over twenty years her senior who had actually just sold off his last asset in life to settle a court case’ meeting her in the bank I had gone fetch the last installment…well I will be telling you about how me and your mother met’ some time if am still able. Being the only boy in a nuclear family of four other girls with me being the second last, both my parents loved me so much, I went to the best schools in the land, had the best suit case at school and I was given appropriate maternal attention throughout my childhood’ my father having attained his mechanical skills through apprenticeship training, he wanted to take me to the best mechanical schools to fill the vacuum he felt. I have trained my self not to blame my miserable end to anyone Giselle, there is something I want you to tell your mother, its some thing I have decided not to tell her’ not because I have been selfish to your mother, I felt I have put her through enough and I dint want her to go through another whirlwind of thoughts, and I also didn’t want her to ever wake up one day and say i spent my last days blaming others for my past. I want you to grow up and know life when you are still young, life in itself is sometimes unfair, it’s full of pleasant and heart wrenching surprises in the same heartbeat, you should therefore be expectant of each of them and most importantly be guarded for the unpleasant surprises not to outfox you like how it happened with your daddy. As a young adult who had grown in the hands of my loving catholic parents, all I expected was life at its fullest especially after having a feel of it in the first half of my life, but the weird twist of fate which suddenly unveiled it self in my life changed everything. While on her death bed after struggling with leukemia for over five years, my mother in the presence us all and some relatives she disclosed a secret that has haunted my life up to today, she looked into my fathers eyes and cried’ after which she I was not my father’s child, that it’s a regrettable sin she committed in a desperate effort to have a boy, adding that it’s a secret she couldn’t go with to her grave. Everyone froze in utter shock, the look on my father’s face was a mixture of disgust and animosity, from that moment everything changed, after my father painfully coming to terms with the revelations, he asked who my real father was’ the period which followed was more sorrowful because that’s when my mother passed on, and arrangements were made to take me to my real father. My life started falling apart, I dint fit in my new home, the people I found there treated me like a total stranger and to make matters worse my new father was a native doctor, I made a decision to live the place and go some were else on my own’ and there and then I started pursuing a new life, a life of myself alone. Devastation and depression took a huge toll on me, I lost my head’ and started doing all the weird things on earth thinking that I would derive happiness from each of them, I started smoking, drinking heavily and my life became a total mess, the more I indulged the more miserable I got but I could not stop, it felt like my life depended on the bad things I was doing, as time went it got so bad real bad Giselle, I lost control of everything that used to be me. Now am on this bed feeling pain even out of the very breath I take, just because of losing control of my life during an important part of my life, but wishing that my little girl gets a better life. I must end here for now it’s getting cold I have to go under covers, but just know daddy loves you and just expect the best in life. To be continued gahimore@yahoo.com