PJ Toral Wanted His Dad To Die
By Mikael Rizada Borres
Portions of the interviews were conducted in Cebuano (Bisaya).
All Cebuano quotes have been translated into English for clarity and length.
Trigger Warning: Alcoholism, Drug Addiction
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Prologue: Love Is Not Blind
I asked Paul John “PJ” Toral, for the third time, my favourite question: Love is [BLANK]. Fill in the blank.
Whenever I throw him that question during our interviews, his answer remains the same, or at least within the neighbourhood of what he’s trying to say.
“I think I’ve asked this a lot of times,” I added.
“And I think my answer would still be the same, that love is not blind,” PJ answered the question for the third time.
“Love is not blind in the sense that…”
“In the sense that you truly love somebody when you choose to love somebody despite their flaws,” PJ explained.
“You can see [the flaws], yet you still love them.”
“Yeah, ‘cause I think that applies to so many aspects,” said PJ. “I choose to just love ‘cause love should be unconditional. Right?”
“Yeah.”
The “Father” Figure
No one knows how or why PJ’s father was lying on the side of the road one night in 2014. No surveillance cameras captured him or his presence; no one claimed responsibility or bore witness to what happened.
A security guard from a neighbouring residential subdivision saw PJ’s father on the ground, recognized him, and helped him get home.
When PJ’s father reached his house, he grappled with temporary memory loss, unable to recall why he was on the ground that night. He also struggled to cope with the physical pain, experiencing severe headaches days after the incident.
PJ can recall coming home from school and his father asking him to check on his head for any wounds; PJ couldn’t find anything resembling an injury.
PJ’s father asked for an ice pack to be placed on his head since he felt a throbbing sensation in his head. PJ placed the ice pack over the head, then removed it after the ice melted – PJ saw “patches of blood.” The headaches continued for two more days.
By the third day of that ordeal, PJ’s father neither had the capacity to stand up by himself nor the ability to remember where he was.
PJ’s mother brought her husband to the hospital, bracing for the worst. She and her children, including PJ, visited him at the hospital every day for three months to check up on him. In many, if not most instances, they would arrive home late into the night after being at the hospital since noon. In her eyes, her husband was in pain and needed help, support, and love.
6th grade PJ, unlike his mother, had no sympathy for his father. As PJ said in his own words when describing his feelings at that time: “I wanted my dad to die.”
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Before his father’s hospitalization, PJ never got to create a close relationship with him. With his father working in Malaysia as a chief mechanic for BMW for a decade, the windows of opportunity to form that familial connection can only be described as scant or sparse.
“He had a good job,” said PJ, “and really, his only problem was that he always spent his money on alcoholic drinks. He never came home and spent time with us because he’d rather spend his time with his friends and hang out and drink out.”
To label his father as an addict would upset PJ’s mother, protecting her children from the fact that their father consumed alcohol and drugs. But as PJ and his siblings matured, they did become aware and see for themselves that their father was using marijuana and shabu (Filipino slang for methamphetamine).
Other secrets, just like his father’s drug use, soon unravelled. Around PJ’s 5th-grade year, PJ and his siblings discovered that his father conceived a child out of wedlock. As all these revelations came to the Toral siblings’ view, their hostility towards their father only got buttressed.
“My hatred of my father worsened because I just kept thinking: ‘Why do we have to suffer for your stupid mistake? You should have just died in the hospital,’” PJ thought for the longest time. “I, on the top of my head, was like, ‘It’d be better if he just died,’ because it was so tiring.
“At just that moment in my life, I was still so young and had so much hatred in my heart, I just kept thinking to myself: ‘Why is life so unfair that I have to be the one to suffer for the mistakes of other people? It was him who used the drugs and drank the booze, but I’m the one who’s suffering now.’”
The Cycle Of Hate (And The Escape)
The doctors couldn’t be sure of what would be the long-lasting effects of whatever happened to PJ’s father on that one fateful night until months after hospitalization. Although his cognitive abilities like memory retention and reasoning processes stayed somewhat intact, he suffered from a brain injury that rendered the right half of his body and brain in permanent paralysis. His physical movements became unstable; his speech turned slurred and perhaps unintelligible for those who try to communicate with him.
The family endeavoured to adapt to their new reality, but his father’s aggressiveness despite his disability made adjusting strenuous. He acted with daunting belligerence. Whenever he could not get his point across or get what he wanted, he often broke objects around him and hurled punches at his wife and caretakers with the remaining strength in the left side of his body. “I, seeing that,” said PJ, “had no other choice but to keep on hating him.”
To be with his father was more than just a burden; he thought it was an act that only yielded excruciating embarrassment. He loathed the judgment that came with being someone whose family member lived with a disability. He was “ashamed” and therefore “hid those facts” about his life.
“I hated pity,” said PJ, who then recalled how self-conscious he felt whenever he and his father would be out in public, sensing other people’s stares at them. “I hate how people treated me nicer because of the circumstances I’m in. And when people find out and say, ‘Oh, Paul has a dad who is disabled. This is what he has to go through on a day-to-day basis,’ I didn’t like that because [...] you can’t meet the person’s true identity when there’s pity at the back of their head. When people sympathize, they immediately become nicer to you.”
PJ’s scorn for his father festered within him like the sore scourge that hate is in this world. To witness someone whose natural role in his family is to care for and protect his loved ones turns on those responsibilities by inflicting forms of anguish — it’s a painful sight.
This festering would then metamorphose into what he thought was his life purpose at that point: looking, acting, and living as if he didn’t need his father – as if that meant that being a separate entity from his father meant being great. “Before, I used to constantly want to achieve a lot because I really want to become successful just so that I could prove to my dad, ‘Mmm, bitch!’” PJ admitted.
The festering marked the advent of the four-year-long “cycle of hate.” After first allowing the gloom and cynicism to unfold inside himself, he then let his whole life be overrun and ruled over by those feelings. Throughout those years, he projected his pain onto those around him and personified the negativity for everyone to see. He sought the drama between himself and other people, leaving no stone unturned to air out the dirtiest laundry and refusing to find the subtlety in people and their flaws.
PJ’s father may have been hooked on shabu and marijuana, but PJ was an addict in his own woeful form. He depended on a mixed fix of misfortune, chaos, and sin to satisfy and comfort himself despite all his troubles, even if it’s all just for a little while.
Those fixes, however, only provided him temporary consolation, thus compelling him to hunt down more gossip to spread and paint the town red with his havoc. The cycle of hate looked like it would never meet an end.
“It was nonsense,” PJ told me during our July 2022 Zoom interview, “but I was looking for a way to express these emotions inside myself.”
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Present-day PJ now sees that past version of him as someone who was more than enthralled to entertain nonsense and be entertained by it all. But it took four years since the hospitalization for him to question his ways. He felt lost. “Like, what was the point? What really was it? What was it?” he shared in the same 2022 interview.
In hopes of answering the questions he kept asking himself, he listened to a friend and started writing in a journal, pencilling in his frustrations and manifestations. The first instances of journaling sure felt stupid and ineffective to him, but he clung to the process as he yearned to feel catharsis.
“I write in a flowery way,” said PJ when he described his way of journaling. “I really like to carefully pick out my words to really encapsulate what I’m feeling at the moment. Usually, I only journal when I have heightened emotions. [...] I don’t journal all the time, but I do journal especially when I’m very sad or happy – super heightened emotions – because it helps me deal with my emotions.
There may be nuances in how and when PJ writes, but the process itself is rather simple as he only has to keep in mind one thing: regardless of whether times are good or bad, happy or sad – write as if it’s all or nothing.
During sessions of PJ jotting down in his journal, he finds himself in tears or with a faint smile whilst reminiscing of all the agony-inflicting moments and experiences, hoping that looking back on the hurt, albeit a cruel exercise, can be the first concrete step to healing.
“I really just state how I’m feeling,” he said. “It’s very important to hurt yourself when journaling. It’s the moment when I allow myself to feel everything that I need to feel. In a lot of circumstances, when I’m really sad, I do not allow myself to really feel because if I do, it takes time for me to recover. But when I’m journaling, I really let myself immerse in all of that emotion so I can really release it all.”
It’s You And Me (Against The Whole World)
Throughout almost a decade since his father’s accident, change whose time has come shaped the Toral household. PJ’s sisters went on to have their own lives, beginning their families’ stories or jumpstarting their professional careers after university. His mother, who jumps between Cebu and Florida to meet her family living in both parts of the world, is still married to his father – but PJ assumes she feels unhappy and tired with the arrangement. The four siblings seem cool to the idea of their mother getting a second chance to love; PJ supposes their father might be willing to let his wife go at the current juncture for the same reason.
Whereas everyone comes and goes in PJ’s father’s life, PJ is the holdout, choosing to stay with his father and take care of him. And during those years, PJ answered many of the questions that used to plague him. If it were not for his hindsight, the pondering could have continued to plague him in the present. But he diverged from the hate, and that has made all the difference.
“I realized that my motivation in life before was hate. I woke up so full of hate and with a lot of anger at the world. And then I realized that [hating] was so tiring because I was constantly exerting so much energy that was just wasted. If you’re a hateful person, to be honest, you’ll get really tired. You’ll get really tired easily. [...] It was just a cycle of bad things, and I didn’t want that lifestyle anymore.”
When he had the time, he took it to help himself “heal” – journaling comes to mind as one of those healing mechanisms. Through those times of healing, he set the slow yet firm pace of reconciling with the reality of being the son of a man whose existence resides in the opposite direction of perfection. Eventually, he has come to “learn to love” his father. “I just thought, ‘I have no choice but to accept the life I was given.’ It’s not like I have the magic staff that can change everything. I just learned to live with it.”
“And then, I guess, when I retrospect about myself, I was too focused on my own pain. I didn’t see that my dad was also suffering. Now, if I think about it, when I see him, he looks really hapless. All those times, I was so focused on my pain that I didn’t realize that my dad was also in pain, that’s why he acted in such a way. Imagine: your life of being healthy is just stripped out of you. Suddenly, next thing you know, you can’t do anything ‘cause you’re disabled.”
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Hate still exists within PJ Toral, but it’s not towards his father. It’s more on his enduring revulsion of society’s perception of his father. A life that includes assisting a person with a disability is oftentimes laborious and aggravating, but it’s not “the end of the world,” as PJ would put it. But people, perhaps out of well-intentioned ignorance, thought that such a life can only be insufferable..
When PJ is with his father in public, passersby would come up to PJ to ask what happened to his father. He still sees the stares strangers give to his father when he’s outside his home and the pity others show still bothers him to this day. Even without talking, those looks can tell his father that they’re watching him. At worst, they might be telling him with his eyes that they’re judging him.
PJ recalls his father, who gets self-conscious of the scars on his face and body, felt the stares of others whilst in the restaurant of the resort PJ and his family were staying for vacation. The rest of the family wasn’t aware of how uneasy PJ’s father was, so it became rather sudden when he got out of his seat and the restaurant.
“He sat by himself, and I went to him and asked him about what happened,” PJ recounted. “He was talking to us, saying that he has a scar and how he’d be embarrassed to go back inside. He was trying to explain that he didn’t belong there. I was like, ‘I don’t care about that. Don’t feel that, Dad. Don’t mind the others because you’re here for us. Don’t care about what people think.’”
Knowing the feeling of being looked down upon by others, PJ prefers to not give “special treatment” to those living with disabilities or the people assisting them. “Special treatment” does not refer to the necessary privileges people with disabilities are given to go on with their lives with seamlessness. (Designating parking spaces, wheelchair ramps, and financial assistance come to mind as examples of these necessary privileges – and those are much-appreciated by those who benefit from those who need access to those resources.)
“It’s more about the pity they show in front of your face because it just makes [people with disabilities] feel bad. For me, personally, I hate it when people do that because it makes me feel so powerless. There’s dignity, my dad still has dignity. He’s not like he’s a dog who should be pitied by everyone. He’s still a human person, he’s still a human being, he still has his own emotions. Do not pity him. Treat him as a regular person because I bet that’s how he wants to be treated.”
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Ten years on, PJ is free from the self-made shame he felt about the relationship he has with his father and the troubles that came with it. If anything, he is more than ready to share his story with others, liking to believe his experiences could possibly help other people in similar situations how to cope with their struggles. “I’ve been so open about [my struggles] ever since I’ve gotten over it,” said PJ.
“I learned a lot,” he continued. “That’s one of the reasons why I’m so open about what I’ve been through is because I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I didn’t go through that, ‘cause I was still very young when all that happened.”
“I can really say that it’s never too late to change your disposition because instead of going throughout your day with so much hate, you can always go 360 and life would become so much better.”
But what would that greatest lesson be? It would be the one that was born out of all the frustrations and testing that PJ’s father may not have given him the father-son bond that societal conventions tell us to emulate. PJ’s father may not even have given his son love in a way that was either tangible or anything that resembles love.
However, if it were not for that decade of strife, the PJ who believes in true love being unconditional may not be the PJ living today. PJ takes care of his father – pushing out his father’s inner saboteurs and attending to his needs – because of the many times in the past when he resented his father for the latter’s addiction, aggression, and absence as a parent. Tragedy became the impetus for PJ’s profound cognizance of himself, which led to much-needed reinvention. Coupled with the all-important willingness he had to be guided by the sudden will to change in the 10th grade, he grew stronger because his father broke his heart.
And for all those lessons PJ learned during those ten years since the accident, we can now say that, without reservation or apology: PJ Toral loves his father, which was only possible because, at one point in his life, he wanted his dad to die.
Epilogue: In The Name Of The Father
I asked PJ if he wanted his own children in the future. “Yes, I do. I really want children,” PJ replied. “If I can’t have my own children, I’ll just adopt, but I do really hope I have my own children.”
“Why?” I asked him again.
“I want to try to raise a child. I want to maybe because I didn’t really have the best childhood. At least, I want other children to have the childhood that I didn’t have. I really hate seeing children with sad faces… My heart really hurts, and I feel compassion for them. If only I had lots of money, I’d have them live with me.”
“Let’s say, somehow, you get a child,” I prefaced. “Who knows how, who knows where, who knows why, but you’ve got a male child – what would the name be?”
“If the baby’s a boy, I’d like to name him after my father,” said PJ.
Other people’s accounts of his father tell PJ that his father was helping those around him and getting warm greetings while walking the streets of Apas. “You know, my father was quite famous when he was still OK. He was known to be very generous. He was very down-to-earth with people.”
“This was the side of my father I never saw because he was always drinking in my eyes,” said PJ. “Sadly though, it never impacted me, but then, at least I know that he was a good person to other people. So, in that sense, I want my child to be named [after my father].”
“What’s your father’s name?”
“Anthony.”
PJ and Mikael conducted an in-person interview on Saturday, August 12th, 2023. Excerpts from their previous interview on July 23rd, 2022 were also used. Read the first feature on PJ Toral here.
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