Apparently, everyone has their hand out—even when you die.
I’m sitting in a room with cousins I grew up with, aunties and uncles I haven’t seen in years. Every one of us, including me, has abandoned the mourning mask. That one is over. Now, they want to know-no, we want to know, “what is it in for us.” When the richest man in your family dies, you certainly hope he left you something. But that’s just wishful thinking when you’re a relative, but as his son, you hope it’s the bare minimum.
Unless, of course, your father is like mine. The kind of man who constantly threatened to give all his wealth away, while still showing you just how vast that wealth was. It worked for a long time. My siblings ended up back here, serving the company one way or another, collecting the crumbs of affection he was also withholding. But I gave up. I stopped trying to meet standards that didn’t meet me.
I remember the call. When they told me, ‘Jnr, your father is dead,’ my ears rang. Today, I looked in the mirror and saw his reflection instead of mine. I was wearing his clothes, a habit I picked up when I came back home. I couldn’t cry. Maybe I subconsciously chose my own way to mourn. Dressing like him comforted me.
The lawyer walks up; he’s my father’s friend, too. The cheerful and chatty room comes to a hush.
He starts, “This is the last will and testament of... He rattles on. One by one, the pieces of my father begin to go. Property. Shares. Land. Piece by piece, we pick at him.
Maybe he knew it would be like this. Maybe that’s why, as a final gesture, he asked to be cremated and for his ashes to be scattered.
What I didn’t expect was that he wanted me to do it. To take him everywhere I had been after leaving home, he wanted to go there with me.
That’s how I ended up standing on a beach in Bali, holding an empty urn, finally crying into a T-shirt he wore to my university graduation. That was my first real goodbye.
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