Not even the `right' curve ball has gone around the earth, what's to be said for the spinning wheel of death?
Whether you know it or not, everyone is searching for something. I was privileged to have a life that was sparked off by death. I didn't need a mid-life crisis to start the search; I was born with the search tied to my umbilical cord. I was born with enough pain to look for meaning and reasoning in my life to extend to others. Hence the Takeaways; a story based invitation into the search.
Having been born and raised in the sweeping winds of war in Uganda, East Africa, I lived an intensely involved childhood. But something was different about me; I didn't have a father. The mystery surrounding my father was closely guarded by the hierarchy on my father's side. My mother never spoke of him either. With the inevitable curiosity of a child, I started to wonder why?
It is this `why' that builds momentum as I face yet another tragedy in the death of my mother; at age ten. Ingrained within the nature of my environment, is base-line conditioning ideas about what an orphan is. As I struggle to free myself from ideas and perspectives projected on to my perceived status, I hide in what is familiar - death.
With me, death seems to be everywhere. Like a shadow hungry for light, it follows me in all realms of realities. Whether it is friends or neighbours, my association with death is a constant. I also seemed to be affected by my parents' death in a different way to my siblings; I didn't grow up with them.
Growing up in different homes, I began to construct ideas of my own. An introverted avid reader, I found solace in the book characters that related to my world. But there was a thirst about me that book characters couldn't quench. The thirst to find my father. The question of who he was kept the momentum of this thirst. But this was met by an equal resolve to keep the wall of silence erect. I sensed a stench about the whole thing, I decided to dive deeper into the search.
In this search, I discovered that everything I had been taught was irrelevant to the search - it was personal. After twenty-eight years of searching, my mother started to appear in my dreams. Intrigued, I started a dream journal that would go on for two years. Like a spark, my mother's dreams reveal nothing of the search but reveal all as I picked up interest in the subject of death. I began to realise that the search was never about my father, it was about me.
My child-like curiosity got the better of me as I journeyed in different worlds to understand death, only to discover that, the search, the shadow of death and the victim mentality was all part of a whole play of life - it was all perfect.
With an eventual air of relaxation to the conclusion of my life's search, I discovered that the man I had perceived as my father wasn't my father. Whether I had the tools to fathom the truth, is a question for the Akashic records. Who was my father?
