There is No Such Thing as Coincidence

My father was incredible: handsome, very intelligent and very well-respected. He was a civil engineer who had graduated summa cum laude from ATM University in Texas. He knew about everything including medicine, which is why it was such a shock when he became bedridden and had to suffer from insulin reaction after insulin reaction. He was diabetic and finally, his body couldn't take it anymore. We three children stood there in shock when the last seizure made him sit up in bed, take a deep breath and collapse back onto the bed. My brother tried CPR but it was in vain. The right people were called. They mulled around. The body was taken, and I remember going out to the backyard looking up at the great expanse of sky and asking, "Why didn't you take me?"

The next few days were a blur of passages of people and forced memories. The one woman who stood out was the one who was in the single file of people giving their condolences to the immediate family at the funeral home and said, "He left his children so young." I wanted to scream, "He was taken! He did not leave us! He was taken " Every minute of every day was agonizing. I was his favorite, I was his "consentida". I felt hurt, angry, confused, abandoned, betrayed, and shocked. All the stages of grief that people take days or weeks to go through I went through over and over every single day.

About two agonizing weeks later, I was fast asleep one night when I heard a knocking at the front door. We lived in a wooden frame house with no insulation so my mother, brother and sister slept on mattresses on the floor in the living room heated by one electric heater. I sat up, no one else had stirred, so I got up and went to the door. It was my father. "Daddy, what are you doing here?" I asked. "Come with me," he said, "I need to explain some things to you."