I'm glad my father
died.
Not because he was ill,
or blind, or incontinent, or lonely or just fed up with the paucity
of his life. He was all these things and only a year into retirement,
but the reason I'm glad he died was because it gave my sister her
life back, and gave me a chance to alter mine in a way he would never
have understood.
My sister spent the
last six years of his life almost as a nursemaid. She was barely
thirty, in a committed relationship and she couldn't move away
because she was all he had. Surrogate motherhood had already fallen
upon her too early when our mother died when I was fourteen. Our
father had been unable to cope and she had to take over anything I
couldn't; primarily the cleaning and the laundry, though I was able
to cook when I got home from school. When I moved away to go to art
school, she stayed local to look after him. She renovated the
derelict house his parents had owned so she could live next door and
when he became ill it was not unusual for her to go into his house,
clean and dress him, change his bedding and wash the floors before
setting off for her own job, then repeating the process on her
return. I did the best I could from a distance, driving the sixty-odd
miles home every weekend.
When he died, just two
days shy of her birthday, she was finally able to relax. She went
away for her first holiday in six years, got married, spent time with
her new husband. She finally got to live her own life.
With the money from the
eventual sale of the house, I changed my gender. I finally got to
live mine.
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