They told me daddy was sick. They didn’t say anything else. How bad could it be? Daddy was strong and everyone gets sick right?
I guess the problem was no one ever said the word cancer, just sick. I knew what cancer was. I knew how bad it was. But no one said the word cancer. Every time I asked, they’d answer it was fine. So I believed it. I lived my live, as normal as ever. My teachers would ask me repeatedly if everything was fine, how was I, how “things” were. Fine, I’d say, everything was as usual. Why did they keep asking that? Why wouldn’t it be fine? Sure, mom and dad weren’t home anymore. They were in the hospital so daddy could get better. I never thought that he wouldn’t come home. I never thought that my mom would one day come crying home alone. My brothers acted normal, like me. But they knew, they always knew, I think. Something in their eyes told me they knew something more. But I never asked. I was selfish, I was happy, I had my friends, and I had my live, so I didn’t ask. I let myself get fooled by their omissions and their lies.

I remember that, after some time, a couple of months maybe, I began to get angry. Angry my parents were never home. Angry with my dad for being sick. Why couldn’t he just get better and be home already? Just one more surgery and we’ll go home, they said, everything will be fine.

The word fine again. I know, annoying right? The word became annoying months after hearing it and saying it almost every day. Until it meant nothing. The thing about words, after saying one a lot of times, they stop making sense. Fine, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine…you get the point? I can’t say it didn’t affect me now that I think about it. When someone asks me if I’m okay, I’ll say fine, even if I don’t mean it. Words are power, but life slowly drains them, maybe not all words lose their meaning, just some, just the ones that mark us the most.
My mom never returned home crying alone. She came home with my dad next to her. Neither of them seemed normal, they looked thinner, weaker. But they were home and daddy wasn’t sick anymore. He had to get a serious surgery and he won’t be the same, were they’re words. My ten year old mind didn’t really understand what that meant, but it didn’t stay ignorant for long. My dad was a cop. And I was proud of it. But after he came back, he couldn’t work anymore, he had to retire. And I never quite understood why my friends’ dads had jobs and why mine couldn’t work anymore. But nevertheless, in my eyes, my daddy would always be a cop.

I guess with this I might seem daddy’s little girl, but I’m not, I never was, even though I wish I was. My dad wasn’t the most loving father; he was kind of psychologically absent really, and still is. He was there, but not the way I wanted. So maybe that’s why I didn’t ask more questions when he was sick, why I was angry at him for being sick, because my mom had to go with him, and be absent too.
Not that I didn’t love him. Because I did, I do. He’s my dad and that’s never going to change.

Only years later I realized what truly happened. Only then I could think that my dad could have died. That, daddy’s girl or not, I could have lost him. I can admit in my head, my dad had cancer. But I don’t say it out loud, I don’t tell anyone, I don’t even talk to my brothers about it. I keep silent and it seems like it happened in another life, it seems unreal, however he has the physical and mental scars.

So maybe it was for the best, being in ignorance. Maybe it saved my happy childhood. And for that, I’m grateful. And I pray that the cancer won’t come back, because this time, I won’t be in ignorance. This time, I’ll know everything and I don’t want to discover if I’m strong enough to deal with it.