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Last photo of Dad and me, Taichung, Taiwan, March 2014

I am not ready to write an obituary for my father, whose unexpected passing happened too soon. I am indecisive about what to title this blog post, except that everything else seems to disappear into triviality. Nothing really matters except what couldn’t be undone —- my father is no longer here.

My memories of my dad are eclipsed around the last moments I spent with him. I was shocked how much he had declined in the one year since I last visited him in his high rise condo in the heart of Taichung. He walked with a cane. He wouldn’t walk to the park with me as he had done the year before. He had forgotten nearly all that I taught him on the iPad the previous spring. That’s why he was no longer available on Facetime. I was adamant to teach him again but he abdicated to his wife. “Teach her and she’ll do it for me,” he said weakly.

He rarely smiled that last week of March 2014, except when I first arrived. He hugged me so hard that I was surprised by his strength. He never showed the pain he had been feeling, only on the last day when he asked me to pull him from the bed to get up. He then confessed that he was experiencing pain all over his thin and frail body.

Each day I’d walk from my hotel to his condo and spend time together. We’d sit on the sofa in his bedroom and “show and tell.” Unlike the previous year, I was having difficulty talking about the present. We regressed to the past. He loved playing old songs of Joan Baez on YouTube. It’s as though the years had not passed.

He often gave up talking on the phone with me (at my hotel) and mumbled in his heavy Shanghainese accent, “can’t hear anything.” Yet when I asked him about getting his hearing checked, he would deny anything was wrong. He watched my lips as I spoke. If I spoke too softly, he’d guess.

Even before my last visit, his emails had become less frequent. When he didn’t respond to my last e-mail, I called and spoke to my stepmother a few days ago. She said,”He is eating now. It’s far from the telephone. Do you really want me to carry him to the phone?”

When it became clear that soon we’d lose all means of communicating with him, I thought of returning to Taiwan. How else would he contact us if he stopped typing and using the telephone?

I set up a Google Plus Account for him and asked him to smile for his profile photo. We never got to try Google Hangout. I never spoke with him again after April 1st.

My dad on March 31st, 2014 in his home