[DOWNLOAD] "Ode to My Father (Belle Lettre)" by Mustapha Marrouchi # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Ode to My Father (Belle Lettre)
- Author : Mustapha Marrouchi
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 74 KB
Description
It was in November of last year that my father fell and broke his hip. And although he underwent surgery, he remained bed ridden until he passed away seven months later. His sister, Tante Mhania, who lived to be a hundred and two, had proclaimed that he too would live to a hundred, which he did not. He celebrated his 91st birthday but his 92nd year was one of failing health. By then, he had lost most of his hearing. His sight, although still good, had dimmed. He had grown brittle and fragile too. At his last birthday reunion he needed to be steered to the cake. We shouted for him to blow out the candles, but he couldn't hear us or see the candles properly. Even so, he smiled and said it was a great day. On that day, that final birthday, I watched Papa, who watched the familiar world around him with intensity, even if his eyes looked like those of a fish in a freezer. For yet another time, he felt the urge to look around him. He experienced the risky but always fertile curiosity to know where he was and who he was. I remember him staring at me and, sensing a darkness inside himself as profound as the one that surrounded him the morning he died, he remarked: "Whatever exists, exists once, and without so much as a flash, will soon disappear." A strange quietude affected me upon hearing him speak of the pain of life, death, solitude; his solitude.