This First Person column is the experience of Fernanda Rodriguez, who lives and studies in Regina. For more information about CBC’s First Person stories, please see the FAQ. WARNING: This column contains details of suicide.
A Saturday evening cartoon was playing in our apartment in Bogota, Colombia, when I got a message that would change me forever.
After my parents divorced, I lived with my mom and usually spent Sunday mornings with my dad. I was nine and he was teaching me how to ride a bike. My older sister would also join us.
I texted him on the phone he had gifted me, writing, “Hey dad, are you picking us up tomorrow?”
He replied saying no. When I asked why, he sent a voicemail.
“I don’t want to live. I am of no use to anything or anyone in this world.”
My phone dropped on the brown couch I was sitting on. I was too shocked to keep holding it. I froze for what felt like hours until my grandpa noticed something was wrong.
“My dad is going to kill himself,” I tried to tell him, but my overwhelming tears made it too hard for my grandpa to understand.
My mom came home some hours later, and I told her about what happened. She seemed unsurprised.
She explained to me that my dad was an alcoholic, and that he wouldn’t actually go through with dying by suicide. That he used to say similar things when she was pregnant and that was why she divorced him.
She knew that he wouldn’t kill himself and that he was just drunk.
My mom’s explanation didn’t particularly comfort me.
After replaying the audio of his voicemail, I realized there were party noises in the background, and that his voice did sound more sluggish than usual.
But I kept picturing my dad’s death. I didn’t sleep that night, thinking of my dad throwing himself onto oncoming traffic or drinking until his liver couldn’t take it anymore.
My dad apologized a couple months later. He took me to watch a movie and we went to have Chinese food.
My dad went to rehab after that.
My father was an inconsistent presence during my childhood. He scraped money together to take my sister and me out. He would take us to a restaurant and say he wasn’t hungry, even though he kept getting skinnier. He struggled to maintain a job. He would disappear and reappear in my life at random. But he always tried.
I was 13 when he died — the result of a car accident after a three-week bender. My sister got a phone call after he went missing with a car that wasn’t his. She broke down and I knew even though she hadn’t told me. The same shock that had frozen me a few years back froze me again, in the same living room, on the same brown couch.
How do you mourn a person that was barely there? I can tell you what I did.
You stop eating for a couple days until an empanada or a pizza that your mom strategically bought looks too tempting not to try. Sometimes, you crack jokes to your family because you know that it is your responsibility — to make your loved ones laugh.
You move to a new country. You make new friends. You go to therapy and it doesn’t work, so you stop going. You have fights with your mom. You start listening to depressing music. And, all of a sudden, the bottles on your step-dad’s home bar start to look too tempting — as tempting as that one piece of pizza.
You tell yourself you can’t continue the cycle. You’re too young to be drinking anyway. But you eventually do.
You’re of age now, you’re allowed to, and you enjoy it. But you fear it. You fear that you might enjoy drinking too much. You imagine your dad’s teenage years and you think that they can’t be that different.
But you tell yourself you’re not going to end up like him. You have the support that he never did. You have a better life now, you have a better therapist, and you have antidepressant medication when you need it. But the thought is always in the back of your mind, that one day you’ll start drinking and you’ll never stop.
That’s what happened to me at least. It’s hard to write a motivational resolution when I’m in my early 20s because so much can still go wrong.
But I’m not my father, for better or for worse.
I’m slightly taller than he was and my skin tone is just a little lighter. My hands aren’t as strong and my taste in music is not as expansive. I’m not as persevering or as hardworking. I’m not as kind and genuine as he was or effortlessly funny.
I spent too little time with my dad to become him, which is a good or bad thing depending on how you choose to see it.
I think of him every time I have a drink. But I also think of him when I go to an arcade and have Chinese food.
I think of his hugs just as much as I think of that voicemail, and the moments together are easier to remember than the moments apart.
I refuse to forgive him because I don’t have to. Because I know he tried. And the one thing I owe him is to try as hard as he did.
Someday, I might even get over my fear of riding a bike.
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