Father-Son Bonding, One Last Time
How God of War (2018) Helped Me Process The Loss of Someone I loved
January, 2022
I made arroz con pollo for my father’s birthday on the 17th of the month. I burned the rice.
He said he loved it.
A few days later my parents and I were eating at a restaurant when I noticed that he was having trouble holding his fork. He was trembling. He said he was cold. The next day he checked himself into the ER only to be checked out due to lack of space. By the third hospital visit he couldn’t drive himself so I begged a friend for help.
She declined. She didn’t want to risk it.
The next week it seemed like he was doing a bit better. He finally got admitted. I was able to visit him. I started collecting the stickers that I would receive when getting screened at the hospital. I only managed to collect two.
February
My father died of Covid-19 on February 11th at 8:20PM.
The days following his death were a deluge of support and fear. Activities included:
A rescue mission
Reuniting with old friends
The kindness of others
…and finally a haircut.
I told myself that after that haircut I wouldn’t cut my hair nor shave my face for an entire year, as a cheap form of grieving.
Once things finally settled down I did what everyone else did. I played Elden Ring.
Life had to keep going, so in an effort to distract myself I smoked that game for over 80 hours. Every evening my friends and I affectionately declared that we were “clocking in” to the game. I sunk 20 hours into Elden Ring during it’s first week.
Sometimes that’s all a game needs to be. A way to just get rid of your problems, even if it’s just for a few hours a day. That was Elden Ring’s narrative to me.
It didn’t stop there. I had to keep going. I had to distract myself even further. In the first 3 months of grieving alone I purchased enough equipment to start a small YouTube channel. For those few months creating videos was a safe, fun way to express myself in a medium that I wasn’t quite used to. As of writing my most recent purchase was a new microphone, so it’s safe to say that video content is still on the table. This isn’t an excuse to plug my additional work, so I won’t link anything.
For my 29th birthday I went to my local Walmart and (almost jokingly) asked
“Yall got any PS5s?”
The associate looked at me with a confused grimace.
“I don’t think so. I’ll check upstairs though.”
Five minutes pass. I’m looking at their game case. “A Zelda Game and Watch. That’s the perfect stupid product to keep in the drawer of my bathroom. I can play a little bit each morning after I have my coffee.”
I wanted to walk out of the store with some stupid bullshit, and that seemed like the perfect stupid bullshit for me. The associate comes back around the corner, lugging around a Playstation 5 like an over-sized suitcase. I couldn’t believe it. A city with a population of 6500 and we just happened to have a PS5. I couldn’t let this opportunity go to waste. I had to have it. I was just about to purchase it when my mother stepped in.
“You’re buying that for yourself?”
“Yeah.”
“How much is it?”
“Uh….$600 or so.”
“Let me buy it for you.”
I absolutely couldn’t let that happen. She wouldn’t let me pull my wallet out however, so for that moment I let her pretend I was a child again. I was channeling my inner N64 kid at this moment, and we walked out to the car.
Before heading back to her place I snuck the console back to my apartment hoping that no neighbors would see me carrying my precious prize. I don’t live in the nicest complex. There haven’t been any break ins in my building but I didn’t want to invite the first. Once we got to her place I thanked her again for everything, and after a solid hour or so of watching her cry I left. It’s an understatement to say that she didn’t take my dad’s passing well. None of us did. He was the rock of the family, and now that he’s gone it’s up to me to take the mantle. That means a lot of things in the long run. For now though it means I just have to get through it.
What does it mean to “get through it”? I’m not sure. For now it means that I make sure my family is safe, and I continue to suffocate myself in my work and hobbies.
October
The PS5 was supposed to collect dust until Final Fantasy XVI came out, but I have had my fair share of fun with Sony’s new console. I played Gran Turismo 7. I played Astro’s Playroom. I finally got to play Sekiro at a rock-solid 60 frames per second. As I scrolled through the games I had already purchased years prior on PS4 I realized that I had one particular game on the back burner for nearly 5 years.
God of War’s 2018 reboot/sequel. For brevity’s sake I’ll be reffering to the game as “God of War” going forward.
God of War received a patch that enabled 4K visuals at 60FPS when running on PS5. I couldn’t pass that up. I booted the game up and remembered why I had forgotten about the game. I don’t think my mind was quite ready to play a game in which you play as a sad dad that bonds with his son for 25 hours. Kratos- the leading deity- doesn’t work 18 hours a day. He hunts, gathers, and takes care of his son, Atreus. My father on the other hand had to work two jobs during the recession just to make sure I had school clothes. Safe to say that my father didn’t have time to really bond with me. No fault of his own however. He did his absolute best to make sure that his family were taken care of, even at the final point of his life.
Without spoiling the rest of the game’s narrative, I will say that the general theme behind the first game (and what I have played of the second) isn’t just the paternal bonds between father and son, but between all parental units and their children. I saw myself in the game through both Atreus, Kratos, and others. I saw my father through Kratos, and I even saw my mother through a few characters. In the twenty hours I played of God of War I made my way through to the ending and beyond, and I loved every second of it, but the bullet point that you won’t see in reviews is that you don’t just have to see yourself in Kratos, but in Atreus as well. For those twenty hours I wasn’t the God of War. I was his son, projected through the actions of the father. I was me. He was my dad.
I got to spend those short moments with my father once again, and without the worry of him not getting enough sleep before going back to work.
-PA