You departed from the physical realm on October 22, 2018, from lung cancer while battling diabetes, and there is not a single day where I don’t think of you. After all, you have left behind an indelible legacy that I will truly never forget. I will always have you in the back of my mind as a gentle reminder of the valuable love lessons you’ve taught me that I will forever be grateful to have witnessed.
Your patriarchal attitude hurt her in ways I could never imagine inflicting on another human being. You mistreated her by belittling her very existence with not just name-calling at the top of your lungs. Because she was a woman, but more specifically, a slave more than a wife, you never acknowledged nor respected her as an equal by having her beneath you at all times. Even in important family matters, you’ve blatantly ignored her input.
Your violent behavior terrorized her not only at home but also in front of patrons at a Japanese restaurant you owned. You drink-slapped the contents in your cup to further embarrass her. By the entrance, you grabbed hold of her by the hair to repeatedly strike her in the head with your fist where a customer dining nearby was able to see. You held her down to strike her in the face on the top bunk while my twin brother and I cried on the bottom bunk. Those were just mere samples of your treacherous cruelty.
The day before you died, you had already lost your ability to speak, and lost most function of your body, except for a constant movement of your left arm, which showed noticeable swelling. As I watched your body decrepitly laying in bed deteriorating from lung cancer, I was disgusted by the man you were and the father you shouldn’t have been. I knew I could never forgive you.
Until your passing, being torn between following or abandoning the societal norm of never speaking ill of the deceased was once challenging. It changed my views when your meaningless waste of human life came to an end. I knew creating a false persona of the deceased that hid the truth of who you were in your wakened life would only diminish the trauma she has endured.
I am not going to pretend this hellish nightmare never existed. I will not wear rose-colored glasses, nor would I let bygones be bygones. I am not tainting your past, because that is the experience you gave us. The guilt, the shame and the embarrassment of our family’s name is irreversible. You’ve singlehandedly destroyed the family by instilling the antithesis of love that left casualties in the midst of your wicked game. As a result, my twin brother suffered the greatest consequence out of any of us.
I was filled with anger toward the mistreatment within our household, but more importantly, the matriarch of the family. How were you able to still look at a woman you claimed to have loved straight in her weeping eyes is beyond me. You can blame it all on your drinking and anger issues, but let’s be clear on this, you were simply an evil human being and the epitome of what patriarchy has always symbolized in every sense of the word. You were born a cancer, who was a cancer to the family, that was taken away by cancer.
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This post was previously published on Change Becomes You and is republished here with permission from the author.
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Photo credit: Masaki Araya