I can’t believe you’re gone.
Like literal disbelief.
My mind can’t comprehend the fact that from now on I would no longer get calls from you, frantically track your location via Find My Friends, or argue with you every time I come back home.

I am angry at you.
One shouldn’t hold grudges to people who have moved on, but that part is being taken care of by my disbelief.
I am angry at you because after a year and a half of sharing, lecturing, yelling and screaming about the current pandemic, you managed to get infected with the entirety of my family and then succumbed to the disease.
Not only that, but you timed your infection to coincide with your vaccination…
If only you were exposed a few days after, you could have made it alive.
If only…

You struggled to understand my job, and I hope your admission to heaven did include a briefing on the status of the people you left behind…
I pray to God that the briefing wasn’t too detailed because there are things that I’m not yet ready to share with you…
But anyway, by now you should know that your son spends most of his time looking unto data, playing with data, and squeezing insights out of data…
And most of that time that data is on the same disease that you died with.

I know behind the numbers are real people and real stories…
I try my best to imagine that but when you’ve got millions of deaths worldwide, you learn to protect yourself from being overly empathetic and focus on getting your reports done…
From now on though, this data would include one story that I can’t ignore…
I need no longer to use my imagination…

Do you now know why I fought with you when it comes to your health?
Why I pleaded with you to stay home?
Why we only met for a limited time and only in the balcony, irrespective of how hot or cold the weather is?
Why I wouldn’t come close to you when I landed from the plane and told you not to come close?
You didn’t take me seriously then,
and it is too late to take me seriously now.

I don’t know about you,
but as for me, I’ve learnt this;
That one can never control anything…
That sometimes one’s worst fears do actually happen…
That one’s individual choices can and will have far-reaching consequences for those around…

I doubt whether I would ever have the chance to be a parent,
but I’ll start taking better care of my health for their sake as of today.
I don’t want them to tinker between stoicism and desperation when they think of me.
Just as for the past several years, I did when I thought of you.