Written by: Youssef Rizk – Beneficiary Services Coordinator.

A father’s heart is the last to fall asleep…

When you see a man crying, know that he has reached an extreme stage of pain, soreness, and helplessness. For a man, crying is the last stage of grief, and when he reaches this level of pain, it means that he has exhausted all he has, all he has completely.

It is not the first case in which I see a man crying, all of those similar situations that I had experienced here had greatly affected me, but this case had way more effect on my heart, and had the most impact!

Perhaps this is because each of us – he and I – have a case of people with disabilities in his family, and they are both girls!! Perhaps this sympathy is due to us sharing of the same feelings… maybe!!

He told me that his daughter had fallen from a high altitude when she was five years old, thanks to God she had survived a fatal accident, but she was severely injured and as a result to this accidents she had been suffering continuous epileptic seizures.

Today, she is a young girl in the prime of youth. Doctors had told him that she would only be treated with drugs that would reduce epileptic seizures but would not treat them completely. 

He told me that he was unable to provide her with this medicine, and while he was describing his financial inability he started crying until he sobbed. I tried to hold on, approached him and patted him on the shoulder. He told me in words intertwined with tears and a voice that could hardly be understood: ‘Me and her mother are sick too… and we need monthly medications, except that we care for her medicine more than ours.’ He added: ‘You know… it’s not her illness that makes me sad, for that is God’s will. What makes me sad is that I am unable to provide her medicine. This is really killing me!!

This 60-year-old man now visits me at the end of every month to take three prescriptions approved by the supervisor of Medicine for the Needy Program: for him, his wife, and his daughter. His daughter’s physical disability may have not been completely cured, but his financial disability that led him to cry has ended, and now when he enters the Society’s reception office, he enters smiling… and leaves smiling.

How beautiful it is to wipe a tear off a face and draw a smile on it. That is success on the scale of humanity.