The Hazy Silhouette

Yesterday morning, while going through my inbox, I came across an email from my half-sister. She informed me that our father had passed away on the early morning of June 10th, at 5:30 AM.

To my sorrow, I never had the opportunity to truly be a part of his life, let alone connect with him deeply.

"You were but a beautiful shadow in the mist. Never truly mine to hold, yet forever a lingering melody.

I once painted a thousand lines just to feel worthy of your gaze.

Now, as the music ends, your silence becomes the final, unwritten note.

The flower is gone, the mist has cleared; at last, I stand whole, all on my own."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99-dvtlgMSs

Back in 2024, I sent my sister a book about the Lin Ben Yuan Family Mansion and Garden in Taiwan. I remembered her mentioning that this was where our father was born, so I intended it as a birthday gift for him. I felt that as people grow older, they live more in their memories.

Reflecting on it now, I am not sure if this gift sparked his desire to return to Taiwan. He traveled back around April, and I have always been deeply curious, yearning to know what stories of the past he shared with my sister’s family.

When I saw photos of him in Taiwan that April, I noticed his face was swollen. It looked so much like my grandmother's when she was gravely ill, giving me a faint, foreboding intuition about his health. Still, I never expected the final farewell to come so abruptly. Yet, perhaps for him, and for his family, it is a form of relief.

When my husband asked how I felt at that moment, I was surprisingly unmoved. He and I were, after all, nothing more than strangers — and yet, my tears still flowed for him.

During my childhood, he was less of a real person and more of a figure living in legends. Perhaps it was because my mother portrayed him in such a beautiful light, or perhaps he was simply an irreplaceable presence in her heart.

As a child, when I was severely beaten by my brother and left completely helpless, I would secretly wait for the gentle father my mother always described, hoping he would one day appear to shield me. Later, when my mother told me that he had once praised another child for perhaps having a talent for drawing, I thought to myself that I, too, must have a gift for it. And so, I became desperate to excel, just to feel worthy of that family. In the end, however, I gradually grew accustomed to relying solely on myself to face the world.

Some beautiful stories are perhaps meant to be left without a full stop. Only by letting the imagination continue can the beauty endure. Maybe from the very beginning, I shouldn’t have tried to reach out; it might have been better to let that hazy beauty remain exactly where it was.

He never replied to my letters. This experience has once again given me a clearer insight into the complexities of human nature and our shared vulnerability and through it all, I have grown yet another step older.