When Death is Just a Station of Life

When he is not your father, but he still calls you his daughter!

I was a very young teenage girl, maybe just 12 or 13 when he proclaimed me as his "unborn daughter" (he meant by that, not being born by him in the biological sense). I was adopted without adoption.

We made pancakes together. In fact, he was the first who taught me how to make them. He had the patience to stand with me next to stove the whole evening while I was just a clumsy teenage girl making more mess than pancakes.

We went to mass together almost every Sunday. We were very often celebrating together Christmass, New Year, Eastern and some other holidays.

He was there when I was getting married when my children were born when they were baptized, all the way through last spring when we buried my mom.

He was standing in front of the bus that was taking me on some excursion and waving. Of course, before I entered the bus, he threw several pieces of advice on what and how to do during the trip, what and how when we get to our destination, and about what to be careful.

He was always in a good mood, always cheerful, making jokes and being fun. Even in the most challenging times, he would stay positive or at least encouraging, if not turning the whole thing into some joke.

When I was visiting him in the hospital, he would tell me, "Don't you have anything better and smarter to do than visiting some old fool in the hospital?"

He was a good listener and a good adviser. All in one! Despite his cheerful nature, he had a strong personality, sometimes even very strict (or at least it seems to me like that when I was younger).

He had a strong sense of righteousness and could be very protectively oriented not only for their own but for anyone he thought was suffering from some injustice.

About ten years or so ago when my life became a total mess, and when some bad dirty mouths who had hardly awaited for something to gossip about, he shut their mouths by telling them, "I don't want to hear a single bad word about my daughter, and especially not in my presence!"

(I did not attend the situation, and he never mentioned it to me, but I have been told about his words from some others that were present at the moment.)

He was helping people around (known and unknown) whenever he could, and always free of charge. Many times people wanted to repay him somehow, but he never accepts anything. Finally, as those repay requests become more and more often, he invented his special repayment currency.

So, when someone would ask him how they could repay him, he would say very seriously, in a way that any objection was out of the question, "You have to say one prayer for this old sinner - for me. That's the only way how you are going to repay me, and I mean it!" And, he really did mean it!

He adored trains and whole his working life he spent working on the railroad as an engineer. He even bought a small house which one side was touching the building of a small local train station. As the house was just a few meters from the rails, we were joking with him asking him as there wasn't any hose for sale exactly on rails. He replied to us with a smile, "Don't you worry! I'm sleeping tight and traveling every night!"

His name was Nikola. He wasn't my father! He was the father of two daughters who happened to be my best friends from my childhood!

Today, after I bent next to his grave to put a big red rose on his coffin, and when I stood up again, his daughters approached me each from one side, hugged me and said almost simultaneously, "He must be glad that we are all here, Sis!"

"What now?" - I asked after few seconds while my chin was still shaking and tears were rolling down.
One of them replied right away, "You know how he would say to us?! - Heads up and bravely forward!

And that's how three of us left him on his last resting place and walked out of the cemetery.

^{_{Image from Pixabay. Credits to Mysticsartdesign for train-forward, used under the Pixabay license.}}

Rest in peace, dear dad Nikola!

I know you would wait for each of us one day on Heaven's railway station!

Posted on Wednesday, April 3, 2019

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_{This article has been (more or less) simultaneously published on WhaleShares too.)}

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