The first face she saw was her father’s.
He was holding her and showed her to her mother.
‘We have a daughter’
he whispered in the hospital, as they held her hands.
And then he smiled and told his wife
I’m going to be the world’s greatest dad. And he was.
He never missed a moment.
He took videos of her crawling and her walking He taught her to swim.
And she would take pride in teaching him coloring.
He would return from work early, to take her to her dance recitals.
And every weekend, she’d sit on his shoulders
and stretch out her arms I’m flying like an angel.”
As the years went by, she began to grow.
And her parents became old.
She could no longer sit on his shoulders,
as they started to hurt his bones.
And then,
when she was old enough, she felt what it was like to fall in love.
Butterflies in her chest. Hickeys on her neck.
Keeping secrets from home.
Smiling and texting over the phone.
She knew what it was like to let a stranger walk right into her heart.
And a few years later, she knew what it was like when that stranger tore it apart.
She went back to her parents’ house then.
And though her father was older, his bones painful, and weaker.
He would sit next to her on her bed, and tell her ‘Beginnings always hide in ends.”
As the years went by, she gathered the pieces of her broken heart.
And just as she was done, she met another man.
And he became her husband.
They moved to another country. They started a family.
They loved each other.
On the good days.
And even on the ugly.
A few years later, she received a call from her father.
She held her breath when he said it.
I’ve been diagnosed with bone cancer.”
It had been there for years.
Cancer took its time and grew with him, now impossible for it to disappear.
After her father’s passing, she turned to religion for comfort.
It welcomed her with open arms. It helped her cope better.
As the years went by. her children grew up as well.
They each tried love fell out of it and found it with someone else.
And when she turned sixty, she became a grandparent for the first time.
And when she was sixty-one, she forgot she had a grandchild.
And then,
like a house of cards, her memory started to crumble.
She forgot her husband. And the names of her children.
And as her dementia progressed, she became difficult to deal with at home.
She was no longer herself. But just a ghost of someone her husband used to know.
On one evening, she stopped eating and drinking and refused to wear her clothes.
Her family then decided to shift her to a care home.
They would visit her every day.
But no matter how many times they did, she still wouldn’t recognize them anyway.
And as the days went by.
She started seeing things that weren’t real, as she became weaker and weaker.
And when her last day on this world arrived.
Her mind traveled back in time.
She spoke about angels, and how she wanted to fly high.
The nurses couldn’t understand her.
Neither could her family.
But she spoke with happiness in her eyes, as her arms stretched wide.
The first face, she saw in this world was her father’s,
and it was the last face she saw before she died.
