I’ve never given much thought to what happens to the human heart when you die. The fact that it stops beating along with your breathing and your skin turns ice cold is a concept my own brain can’t wrap itself around. I also never realized how long I held my breath after my father died.

 

I remember the day I learned of his passing. A sudden jolt of energy forced me out of bed with only one thought in my head, “I’m hungry.” I went downstairs to the kitchen to find something to satisfy the growling in my stomach. Instead, I found my sister and mother quietly whispering at the dining table. I remember thinking, “How odd? Never once in my life have I seen them sitting so close with a vast ocean of tension flowing between them.” Their voices went quiet when they saw me standing within earshot. I noticed my mothers’ eyes were red and puffy, my sister fidgeting with her hands. I could feel a sense of uneasiness clawing up my throat.

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“Hey Zeira, we need you to sit down really quick.” My name rolled off my sisters tongue and I knew instantly that from this moment forward, I would no longer live in my peaceful innocence. With the thoughts of food long gone, I took a seat in the chair closest to the door because something deep inside me knew I was going to want to run away from this conversation. “We have something to tell you. It’s about your father. He passed away a couple days ago.” I watched my sister mouth these words to me, but my vision went blurry. My mother, having started crying the moment I sat down, made no effort to reassure me. My big sister, my role model, my rock was forced to tell me herself. To hold me as I caved into myself with my own tears. Her eyes were tearing up too. This surprised me since I knew she viewed my father as the evil intruder of her childhood. She constantly retells me the stories of my father’s intrusion into her home, her life, and how she stole our mother’s inner self and turned her into someone she didn’t recognize. Later, I realized she wasn’t crying because she mourned my father, but because she knew she had to watch my inner demons devour me whole.

 

I had so many questions. How? When? Why? But my own thoughts kept returning to the guilt I felt for not knowing sooner. Years prior, I had cut all contact with my father. After learning about his infidelity throughout my parents’ marriage, I forced him out of my life. At the time, I was blinded by rage. Right then and there I decided I wouldn’t waste my time attempting to forgive him. I bottled up all those emotions and pain and forced myself to move on. I had time to face this later. I will make time, later. Now he was gone. I had lost time. I couldn’t stay angry at a dead man.

 

It’s been 4 years since he passed. Every year I grieve differently. One year, I placed his photo on our families ofrenda during Dia de Los Muertos, only because I felt sick not including him. As if he would haunt me from beyond the grave. Another year, I drank so much that I would forget to mourn him. I woke up the next morning shivering, as if the blood in my own body had run cold. My brothers, who never spoke a single word to me prior to our father’s death because they despised my existence, had taken it upon themselves to critic the way I mourned. From pointing out when I forget to post on social media on the anniversaries of his death, to criticizing the number of tears I have shed since.

 

I no longer talk to them. They say death brings family closer, but I’ve never felt more distant from them. Their judgment and my inner turmoil about how to mourn him have caused me more pain than I deserve to deal with. I am one human being with her own beating heart. With lungs that still fill with air and blood that boils at the trauma my father has caused me. I don’t need to forgive him until I’m ready. And I don’t need to force myself to think about him when the echoes of his heartbeat can be heard within me. Whether I want it to be or not, he will always be a part of me. That thought alone is what keeps me breathing.