The Day Was Sunday

It was May 29th, 2022 and the day was Sunday.

The day before, I went out with a couple of friends and watched what I thought was (and still is) the best movie I watched this year, Top Gun: Maverick. Coming out of that movie, I was so excited to tell all people about it. My first destination was my family’s Whatsapp group, knowing that my dad loves action movies a lot. I sent the movie poster and hyped the movie up so much, it went something like this:

Aku baru nonton Top Gun bagus BANGET papa pasti suka. (I just watched Top Gun and it was SO good. Dad would love it)

Gila ya Tom Cruise ganteng banget dia lebih tua daripada papa. (Tom Cruise he’s so handsome I can’t believe he’s older than dad).

My sister reminded us all (me, mostly) that the day after, on Sunday would be my mom and dad’s wedding anniversary. She suggested that my dad take my mom on a movie date. Something that they haven’t done in years. I thought it was a perfect plan, and my parents also thought it was a good idea.

Since I left for Singapore to work and my sister was back in Surabaya to prepare for her residency entrance examinations, my parents’ Sunday routine was fairly simple. They would go to church in the morning, eat lunch in a local shophouse nearby, and my dad would go to his weekly ping pong session. Afterward, he would come back home and they would either go to a shopping mall or a neighborhood restaurant for dinner.

That particular Sunday, they were planning to go to a nearby shopping mall to have dinner and catch Top Gun: Maverick. My mom didn’t watch the movie that day, and my dad never had a chance to catch it.

It was around 5 PM Singapore time and I was having a video call with my sister, just regular catching up. At some point during the call, she told me to hold the call because one of our relatives was calling her.

First, it was news that my dad had a heart attack. My sister still stopped me from calling my mom or booking a flight home. “There are various kinds of heart attack, you might not have to go back, just me. Don’t call mom first, she’s busy looking for dad’s health insurance card. She’ll go to the hospital after”. She is the doctor between us, and boy, how much I wanted to believe her at that moment, that it might not be serious enough, that I don’t have to go home.

Second, it was a call from my dad’s sister. A sound of distress, telling me to go home, not exactly saying if my dad was still alive or not.

Third, it was a call from my mom confirming that my dad was gone. She was crying. It was the first time in my life hearing her cry over the phone. She had just lost her husband of 28 years, on their 28th wedding anniversary.

It happened too fast. From the people that were with him, I learned that my dad was resting after his ping pong session on a sofa in the court, reading and replying to Whatsapp messages. There were still messages from him on a group he was in, minutes before his heart attack. When he was brought to the hospital by other people who were in the court, he was already gone.

My father’s wake was held for three days. Those days went in a blur, I couldn’t even believe during those days what had happened really happened. There was no symptom, my dad was never in the hospital for any related heart problems. Except for the Covid he had in 2020, my dad was never really sick.

I never saw so many people at a funeral until I was in my own dad’s. He had a ton of friends, colleagues, and past colleagues. He had touched so many lives.

Your dad was quiet, he didn’t talk much but he was a really good friend.

My own relationship with my dad was a tough love one. We had very similar hard-headed personalities. Whenever we had an argument it was just us banging our heads against each other. He was tough. As I grew up, especially in my teenage years, I was a rock. I was a rock, especially to him.

I criticized the way he thought about things a lot, corrected him and preached to him. Early this year I thought I had learned a lot about financial planning so I told him to save some money for retirement and not spend all of them on travel, something he really loved to do.

Imagine that. A daughter who just had her first paycheck told her dad who was in his 50s and had worked hard all his life how he should spend his money. I’m glad he never listened to me and traveled anyway.

Regardless of how snarky my remarks were or how preachy I often was to him, I was still his favorite. I was the only one in his contacts he saved with the suffix “-ku”. Ireneku. My Irene. Not even my mom or sister crowns that title.

I never knew what losing a family member felt like until I lost him. There were a lot of if onlys. If only we had pushed him more to do proper health screening. If only I had bought him the things I promised to buy him. If only I had gotten married. If only I had shown him how much I actually adored him. If only I had been home more often, all throughout my uni years when I lived near campus and when I started working.

I never knew I could cry so much, or how much I could miss him.

My dad was an engineer and a salesperson. He worked in various energy industry companies before he started his own with a friend 12 years ago. Around a couple of months before his passing, he was telling my family about how he wanted to sell all of his shares in the company and retire. His business partner has a daughter who is already in the business. My sister was and is still in school, and he knew there was no way his other hard-headed daughter would want to be his successor. There was simply not enough reason to stay in the business.

I was very supportive of that idea, giving him a lecture on the various way he could invest the proceeds of the sale so that he and my mom could comfortably retire. He was 58 and the work he was doing was very taxing. With me having my own income, I thought it was the perfect time for him to retire and take the rest he deserved.

He never got to start any deal on that sale. After he passed away, I stayed in Jakarta for about a month to take care of the sale he never got to do. By the end of it, we were exhausted. We’re exhausted from the paperwork we had to take care of. The business negotiations were emotional and it felt like they went on forever.

My dad’s hard work got reduced to a number that we couldn’t even prove was not fair. None of us in the family ever had anything to do with the business. There was another regret that stayed with me. If only I had understood better what he had been working so hard on.

What’s the most painful for me is to realize, after the deal was sealed and we received the sum, that my dad would never have a chance to enjoy any of this.

This blog post is the most personal one I’ve ever written. The account above is something I’ve never told anyone other than people very close to me. Approaching the end of this year, I’ve done a lot of reflections. Reflections on what I’ve gone through this year, and how I had become. I realized that life this year was divided into two for me, before and after that Sunday evening.

I realized that really, life is a fickle thing. It could go away just like that.

The people we love, sooner or later, will die. Either we die first, or they die first. Any healthy habit, medication, or medical advances will at best delay it, not stop it.

I used to think that my 20s will be about me, me, and me. My career, my growth, and my relationships. That the difference between being in your 20s and 30s is being in your 30s will be the start of you taking care of other people other than yourself. I’ve learned to understand that this could not be further from the truth. I was so naive about the timing of life, thinking that my 20s will just be an extension of my school years.

After the first round of grief and the formalities of the death of a family member subsided, I learned the importance of now.

We’ve learned about the importance of time, patience, and the waiting game. What we often forget is how important it is to really think about what we want to do now. Not when I reach 30. Not when I have a million dollars. Not when I’m financially independent and can do whatever I want.

That when might not even exist. If that when happens, you might not even want the same thing, you won’t even be the same person. You might be too late, and all these things on your list would turn into if onlys.

There’s no better time to do the things you want to do, especially for your loved ones, than now.

I create this little space on the internet to write my thoughts and reflections on being a human, a woman, and a software developer. I don't have Instagram/Twitter but I can be found on LinkedIn. Feel free to contact/give feedback/tell me your story through my email: ivanaairenee@gmail.com