Elaine Miller
Curse: From a Daddy to a Father
Angry. Angry. Angry.
A Daddy's Curse: To My Lover's Father
I was angry enough to wish you dead but I've changed my mind.
I wish you life, exactly as you have arranged it for yourself. Live long, and enjoy the fruits of your pride.
Enjoy your old age, surrounded by loneliness. Enjoy your impending heart attacks. Enjoy the reminder of your own mortality every single day that you awaken to find your wife gone. She's dead now, and she'll never come back to do your bidding again. Enjoy your helplessness -- that of a man who never bothered to learn to care for himself, because there were always womenfolk to do it for you. Please, never learn to cook anything you can stand to eat.
Enjoy your new living situation, living with your dead wife's mother, a woman who regrets allowing her only daughter to marry you. Because daughters are important. Too important to waste. Too important to throw away casually.
Please wake up each day, and go to bed late that night, knowing that your are missing the joy a daughter can bring to you. Please never forget that, in the spot deep inside you. Even if it never makes it to the surface of your conscious mind, always feel a part of your family and your own flesh and blood missing. Do that for me, would you? And please, never forget that it was you who lost it, who cast out your flesh and blood.
And when someone speaks, in your presence, of cruelty, don't ever forget what you did.
Never forget that on the very day you buried your wife, your daughter buried her mother. Never forget that it was you who gave the cruelest stroke that day, more cruel than the cold fact of her mother's death. Because her mother left her lovingly, and unwillingly, torn from her by the slow leeching-out of life that cancer brings--and takes. You pushed her from you on the very day that she needed you most. You stole her honest grief, and hurt her deeply.
Because being queer is sin enough to warrant any cruelty, isn't it? Yeah, keep telling yourself that for all the years you have left..
I wish you a long, long life. You deserve it.
-Elaine Miller
