By Mark Richards
Father; please tell me who you are. I never saw your face, never felt the warmth of your embrace. I have no memory of you; I have only bitter recrimination and an angry heart. I didn't grow in your love; instead I was crushed under your shadow. You are a masked monster to me, but others tell me you were once loving and kind. Please tell me who you are Father, so that I can at least begin to know you.
Tell me that it wasn't true. That those moments of horror and terror you brought into my life weren't really you. Please Father. They speak of goodness inside you and I so much want to believe but I saw no evidence of it. You never showed me your compassion; you brought me pain, restraining me as you allowed my home to be destroyed. Beneath those unblinking hollow eyes they say there was a man. A real man, not a machine. My Father.
Help me understand why you turned away from me, why you left my mother, tore apart our family and hunted my brother. Why did you do this Father? Why did you allow yourself to be seduced, what was it that made you so angry and twisted? What could have done this to you? Was it he? Was it the witch of the Dark Side? Let me see why so that I can share your torment. I want to love you, but I can't. I have nothing but these irreconcilable feelings of hate and sheer loathing of what you were, of the Father that I knew. Let me feel your heart, let me touch your darkness, allow it to be free to tell its story. I want to hear it, everything, I want to know why it made you into the abhorrent creature that threatened my life. Please Father, help me understand.
It has been two years since your body was laid to rest and while the peace returns to my life and to the galaxy, I still have this aching inside. This enormous hole, a part of me that is dead and dark. That is you Father - that is your place in my heart. It is an ugly ruin of love, a twisted pounding hatred that even disgusts me. I have learnt to live with my enemies, to reconcile the atrocities against my fellow people, but I can't yet forgive what you have done. My brother saved you, redeemed you from the darkness, learning and touching the warmth and goodness that flowed through you - the conflict within. You never showed me that side, you never allowed me to feel close. All my life, you shut me away, pretended I was not you're daughter, until that knowledge would serve a purpose. And then you turned it against him, didn't you? You wanted your son to taste anger, to feel the hate that had come to dominate your soul, even if it meant destroying you. Father, why did you want to lay down your life to enslave your son? Did you want to be released from his grip? Or did you at last acknowledge what my brother has told me, finding the goodness inside, but too afraid to let it be free?
All these questions! And you have no answers! You don't answer my calling. I can't feel you through the Force, although I know you're there, listening. I don't feel it, I just know it. Like I know that you are my Father. For all the terrible wrongs that you have done, don't you see that I am trying to learn to love you? I want to bury my past and I need you to lay it down in its funeral shrouds. I need you, Father.
You were once Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith, a name that alone struck fear and revulsion into the free of the galaxy. I became everything that you are not, I became a Princess, a respected, loved and trusted freedom fighter. Together somewhere we have become very different people, driven apart by our own conflicting masters and destinies. But we can come together again. Like you did with my brother, Luke, you can return to my heart. It will be a long and difficult path to conciliate the enormous gulfs that have erupted between us, but I need you Father now more than ever. I need to walk amongst my people and understand what my Father did. I need to look them in the eye, without feeling a part of me is lying about my true heritage. Most of all I need you to fill this awning hole in my heart.
Please, close this widening abyss between us, help me draw back some of the darkness and reveal the light that burns so passionately in your soul. I know it is within you and it is in my heart to begin to forget, but I can't do this alone. I can't go on facing the people I love, leading the people I have fought for, without you. I need you Father.