Childhoods End
Author: Ken Homer Issue: 2024-11-20
Childhood’s End
by Ken Homer
I’d never seen my aunt look so anxious. And it was common knowledge in our family, that she was a worry wart who always looked anxious.
Her blue eyes welled with tears and her frame was stooped sorrow. The creases on her face seemed deeper than usual. She drew me close to her, her cigarette laden breath washed over me. Your father’s in the next room. I’m very concerned about him.
I want you to go and tell him that you are a man now. I want you to tell him that you can take care of yourself. I want you to tell him that you will take care of him.
Sensing the duty her words required I squared my narrow nine-year-old shoulders. Drew myself up to my full 52 inches of height And marched in to see my father and repeated her exact words.
As I repeated my aunt’s declaration aloud, I could sense the crushing weight the mantle of adulthood brings with it. My life from here on out would never be the same. The carefree days of my childhood ended in that moment.
My father leaned down to hug me. The tears in his eyes made me uneasy. I hated seeing my father cry–it twisted my insides into awful shapes. I stared at his feet when he told me he loved me, to this day I recall his canvas shoes.
I didn’t know at the time what I had just done. Nor did I have an inkling of how much my life was about to change. Or of how lost, rudderless, and bereft I would soon feel.
I only knew I had to do what my aunt had told me to do. Lest something horrible happen to my father. And after losing my mother I couldn’t let that happen.
Little did I know that my mother’s death, which terrified me beyond imagining, had just swallowed whole my young life. Which would now be very different. I was still me, but I was no longer the person I’d been only a few moments before
Ken Homer • January 2024
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