Mountains of my life: Forever Soldier

My Father's Fantasy

There was in my father a trait that was so enormous that I didn't realize it until after his death. Only now when his smiling and humorous face reckons in my memory that I feel like crying and urging God to revert the miracle between me and my father.
He was poor and simple and alone. His mother died when he was very young; his American father left and abandoned them when they could hardly survive, and my father was left to the care of distant relatives.
In the strictest sense, he was alone in this world. But as a grown-up man, he was jolly and didn't care for many things. He cared for us, he cared for me and Mamma and everyone in the family.
I was already a family man with two children when I realized his care was never fading. I became a handicapped, paralyzed from waist down, when he said the very humanistic and fatherly statement that could never be erased from my heart until I die.
"I want to be like you, son."
He said those words with all humility and sympathy. I heard him murmur that if he were given a chance to take my place, he would gladly do so. I clearly heard him mumble a few words like this:
"If God should hear my prayer, I'll probably be sitting there and you would have been released from the bondage of that wheelchair."
Such was a statement that wasn't desperate. Or to conclude that he said it because he was in the twilight of his life. At 63, he was active and with "carabao" strength. He was eloquent when he'd boast to Mamma of his exploits in strength competitions among relatives of my co-patients in the hospital.
I was still confined in the hospital when he suffered a mild stroke. That however didn't drive him to my wheelchair. Months after, he acquired cancer, a sickness that gave him a few months to live. When I visited him in his hospital bed, he hurriedly got up and asked me to vacate my wheelchair. While he was crying, I felt strength inside me. I was feeling a miracle. God was touching me.
Although I wasn't healed physically at that instance, I was cured morally. My father's death brought me sadness and happiness, strength, but above all, the feeling to live again. Thank you Papa for the miracle.