Her Father’s Hand.

 Emma’s father was always there for her, from the day she was born. She could clearly remember times they played together, when she fell asleep on his chest listening to his heartbeat, the way he sounded and smelled. When he came to check on her at night when she had terrors and he held her until the storm passed.  When he caught her at the point of falling when she just began to walk, and the times he comforted her when he couldn't reach her in time. She remembered waking up to see her father striding into her room and lifting her out of her cot. He hugged her every morning. She fondly recalled riding in the back seat as her father drove her to school or home, watching him as he watched the road, focussed on protecting her life and getting her home safe to her mother, or toddling after him as he mowed their small lawn, or trimmed his bonsai trees, sometimes riding on his shoulders as he watered their small garden.

 He had spent hours upon hours with her, watching over her, guiding and nurturing her, always available if she needed anything, from a diaper change, to life advice. He wasn’t perfect. But he was her father, and he did the best he could, and she loved him fiercely for it. As she grew up, he was always there with helpful advice, or corrective scolding. On occasion they fought, as parents and children too, but she knew that, no matter how hard it became, no matter what was said, he would always make time for her and her problems.

 He would always be there. 

 In many ways, her life mirrored his. He had instilled in her a love of reading and music, a deep empathy and appreciation of nature, and a culture of hard work tempered by times of rest and play. Even before she had moved into her own place, she had cultivated her own bonsai trees, grown from seed, and trained them into beautiful works of living art. Her father seemed particularly proud of an Akasia tree, that she had sculpted when she was 10, into a shape reminiscent of a womanly body stretching up to heaven. He had taken her and that tree and entered them into a local bonsai contest, where she won second place. The little medal had been framed and hung in her father’s study.

 One concept she inherited from him was the cities of the mind. “Every event in your life is a city, sweetheart.” he would say. “You can choose to populate those cities with happy people, happy memories, or with sad people. It depends on you and what you decide to keep in your life.” And because she was raised to look at the good of a situation or a person, most of her cities were places of light. There were a few dark towns in the landscape of her mind, but on the whole, her mind was a cheery and well lit place. 

 One thing she learned later in life was that her father had fought crippling depression his entire life. He came from a broken home and a fractured family, and he had been determined to spare her that. He succeeded in giving her the home and the childhood he had so desperately wanted, a stable, peaceful and loving home and a childhood filled with joy. She had never seen it, never had any inclination that her father had any ailments of that nature. She marvelled at his strength to keep it so well under control that she never knew of it until after his death.

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 She had a city for everything. She had a city for her years in preschool and her first friends, primary school and her first pseudo-boyfriend, and high school, where she blossomed into a beautiful young woman, desired by all the boys.There was a city for her time at university, her first love and her first lover, and her first job as an intern in one of the country’s most prestigious hospitals. When she moved out of her parents’ house and into her first little apartment, she painted a beautiful scene of a new city. It was hanging in her fathers study until the day he passed away, when her mother gave it back to her. She had cried that night on her husband’s shoulder for hours. Her husband cried with her, as he had also dearly loved the old man. Emma’s father had had an incredible impact on his life as well. Emma’s father had shown her husband that it is possible to rise above your past, and build a better future for their children. The times her husband spent with her father was, by her husband’s admission, some of the best times of his life. The lessons he had learned there he had taken and implemented with his own children, who also grew up to be fine and upstanding members of society.

 There was a city reserved just for her father. All her memories of him dwelled there, the good and the bad. All the lessons he taught her, actively and passively. When he taught her how to drive, and how to fire a pistol on her grandfather’s farm. When he showed her how a seed can turn into a plant with wet cotton and a sugar bean, how that sugar bean grew up into a strong and healthy bean plant, and produced beans of its own. He taught her about life, and when one of their cats didn't come home from the vet one rainy day, he taught her about death. She remembered being extremely upset when he told her that he will also die one day. She had cried and he had held her.

 It was one of the brightest cities she had, next to her own children. 

 And now, as time is wont to do, she was building her last city. She was 94 years old, and could feel that her time was approaching. So she built her own city, made up of only the best she had experienced in her life. It was a place of peace, love and beauty. She smiled as she toiled to make it perfect, just the way her father had taught her, and she had taught her children in turn.

 As her spark went out, she saw him waiting for her. He was exactly as she remembered him, not the tallest man in the world, with dark blonde hair and blue eyes that she inherited from him, wearing his customary shorts and t-shirt. There was his grey-flecked beard that he kept trimmed from her time as a baby, when she would grab at everything and pull. He learned quickly that Emma had a deathgrip and liked yanking on beards. The smile that lit up his face as she approached was like the sun rising in the morning.

 As she took her father’s hand again, and they walked off into the sunrise of life in the Summerlands, she smiled at him. “I knew you’d be waiting for me, father.” 

 He merely smiled at her as they walked through the vibrant field sprinkled with summer flowers. She knew that her father’s hand had always been there, guiding her and will be there again in the next life again. 

 Some bonds are never broken.