My Biggest Secret

My Biggest Secret

My father handed me a sheet of paper six months before his friend Bernard again handed me a sealed envelope after he died. My father had been diabetic and because he was not particularly a man of some means, the disease wore him out. My father became paralyzed losing the use of most of his sense organs - he couldn't pee, couldn't pee, couldn't eat, and couldn't talk to you. In that vegetable state, I was the one there helping him feed, guess at whatever he wanted and carry him on my back whenever I thought he needed to go to the john. His wife who had run away sometime before he became critically ill came back to help out. But you did not have to make a guess at what daddy felt about her coming back whenever you looked at his face.

The sheet of paper my father handed me (it's right here in front of me) was typed and addressed to me. It had a caption, INTEGRITY, underlined twice and had that word defined with three words, also all written in upper case thus: UPRIGHTNESS, WHOLENESS, and PURITY. At first when I casually glanced through the ten-paragraph document, it didn't make much sense to me. I asked myself: why was he handing me this document on integrity? Was he by any chance trying to tell me that I wasn't upright and that I should; that I was not whole and that I should endeavour to be whole; and that I wasn't pure and try to purify myself?

But I began to be preoccupied with a lot other things after he died, that is, until his friend Bernard walked up and handed me that sealed envelope he said was from my father in the event of his death. I opened it but this time it had another sheet of paper with another kind of title. It was an intriguing one. The content of that sheet of paper is not one I wanted to keep a secret but I had no choice but obey the wishes of a dead man who was my father.