I’m now 30, and to imagine that when you were my age, you already had my brother and me. Being still unmarried and unsure what I really want out of my life, I cannot believe that you were working full time yet still somehow managed to come home to us every day to have dinner together, to read us to sleep, and to have the energy to bring us out on the weekends. It is oddly heartbreaking for me to think of how our relationship has changed over three decades.

For the first decade, I had clung on very tightly to you, to dad, and to my siblings. I don’t know when people start fearing death, but I am very sure that death was one of my first and greatest fears. Before I turned ten, I remember sitting with you by the window being very afraid. I asked you if you would wait for me at the gates of Heaven so that you could be the first thing I saw when I died. I made you promise, over and over again, to stay there and wait for me so that we would not be lost from each other.

The second decade, as with most parent-child relationships, things changed. I was growing into my own, so they say. From a loving, close, relationship, ours turned into a cold one fraught with secrets and anger. Emotions had subsided by the time I went into university overseas and you took two weeks off work to help me settle in. However, I will regret not being matured enough to have recognized your action as love. I am ashamed that I did not reciprocate, and instead I left you alone in my dormitory while I went out and stayed out late into the night under the guise of making new friends. You let me sleep on the bed, you took the sleeping bag on the floor. To think that I had only deigned to have dinner with you once during the two weeks, while you were alone in my room with nothing else to do. I try to wipe the memory of the second decade out of my mind.

The third decade, thankfully, I matured midway through and started trying to get the relationship back to where it should have been. Alas, time and maturity are trickster twins – the moment you get one, the other starts slipping away. One night, we were driving late at night to grab Macdonald’s for my brothers, when all of sudden for no apparent reason you turned to me and said so very nonchalantly, “I wonder what your brothers would look like when they grow old”. I don’t know what that comment meant to you then, but I think of what you said every now and then and it saddens me to think that the futures that my brothers and I walk towards everyday will always remain a mystery to you after some point.

Today, I wish that I can spend more time with you, yet I also feel my own dreams and ambition tugging me in other directions. As I get to the age you were when I pestered you to wait for me at the Heavenly gates, the fear that the time I have left with you is running out looms larger. Up till my last decade, I only had to fear some ungodly catastrophe, a freak accident, some rare, black swan event that would cause you would be taken away from this earth. Today, the fear of losing you is no longer irrational; the fear is real and it gnaws on me, it is a logical conclusion to the ailment of life. It grows every time I see you and notice that you have gotten skinnier, that you look frailer. Every time I hear you complain about some new thing that is bothering you, whether it be a worsening memory or unexplained pains, I am reminded that unlike other fears, this is one fear that will come to pass.

I cannot change the past and treat you as you deserved then, and I cannot control the future and get to have you in my life forever. The only thing I can do is to believe that I am making the right choices in balancing time with you now and time to work on my future. When the day comes as I know it shall, then I can only be strong and believe that you will wait for me as you had promise those many years ago. Loss is a pain that everyone on earth will go through, and we are no different. Neither of us are perfect, but I will not let that nor any fear stop me from loving you better.

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