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A rustling, verdant expanse stretches out in all directions, swallowing the horizon and the sky, extending so far as to seem infinite. Over the soft whisper of the leaves, distant sounds echo through the dark, victorious cries of jubilation mingling with the squawks of creatures blissfully ignorant to the significance of this night. As vast and wondrous as it all seems, however, it is the steady crackling of fire that feels the most significant, the flames casting the vivid green of the trees in an eerie orange glow as they work to consume the funeral pyre. Rooted to the spot, at once part of and dwarfed by the endless forest, you stand as a lone figure, clad in mourning black, basking in the odd illumination.
Celebrations rage throughout the galaxy, and well they should, as the shackles of imperialism have been cast off in favour of the new dawn of democracy set to rise in its place; in you, it all rings slightly hollow. Tonight, the galaxy rejoices at the death of a monster. Tonight, you mourn the loss of a father.
There is no other soul in existence who could possibly hope to understand, no other being you can share this with, so instead you turn to the trees and dirt and distant creatures around you for comfort; they are all you have. Your eyes sting from the smoke and ash and grief that threaten to flood them with tears, but the shaky breaths rattling against your ribcage serve to ground you and bolster the floodgates.
How many times have you said this particular goodbye? The first time came when you were old enough to understand life and death, to understand that your aunt and uncle were distinct from your mother and father, to realize that your family wasn’t quite like what the other kids had. It was a goodbye that came before you were even born, settling upon you as you grew and instilling within you a mixture of dim acceptance and a sense of longing that you never really left behind. As the years passed, you learned more and more about him, forcing you to say goodbye over and over again. Every new revelation introduced you to a different version of your father, and each time you convinced yourself that, at last, you could say you knew him.
How foolish you had been. You never really knew him at all.
Anakin Skywalker was a man introduced to you through hearsay, through gossip, through stories. As a boy on Tatooine, they were the only link you had to your past, and you clung to the tale of a young slave who won his freedom and took off to see the galaxy, even if it was only as a navigator. Then Ben told you that your father had been a Jedi, and the stories only seemed to grow from there. Among those in the rebellion old enough to remember the Clone Wars, your father lived as a story, a figure so mythologized he could not possibly have been real, but even knowing that, you still took each word as gospel. Stories were all you had left of Anakin Skywalker.
You did not mind the goodbyes that came with these truths quite so much, because the man who came in their stead filled your eyes with wonder and set your heart soaring. The versions of your father presented to you through these revelations took someone you had always loved and shaped him into someone you could idolize. Once, you had simply hoped for something more; now, you had someone you could aspire to be. With the truth came drive and purpose, the hope of living up to your father’s legacy, of creating your own stories to be told alongside his, of becoming someone who could, someday, make him proud. A renewed fire sparked within you at the chance to do right by your father, which meant you had to face –
Darth Vader.
In a sense, you could say that you knew Darth Vader better than you knew Anakin Skywalker, personal experience leading to better understanding than stories – though the rebellion certainly had no shortage of those surrounding Vader. What you knew of him, however, was thoroughly steeped in anger and hatred, stemming from both the dark figure you sought to confront and some place within yourself. You’d been told to resent him, to fear him, to seek his destruction, because he’d been the cause of your father’s, the cause of so many others’, and could very well seek to be the cause of your own. Despite being warned against it, you clutched that anger close to your chest and allowed it to fuel you – until, at last, you learned a truth that changed everything you knew about both Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader.
Yet again, you said goodbye to your father, but this time, you were left preferring a permanent goodbye that would give you a blank slate of nothing in his place rather than what you got instead.
As the flames lick at the remains shadowy form that served as the embodiment of your fear and anger and hatred for the better part of four years, the ghost of the terror he once brought flickers within you. Denial and despair had crashed over you when your world was shattered by the fateful proclamation that had been thrown at you as you dangled over the abyss. Tumbling off that gantry, you expected to meet a sweet and fitting end, but instead you survived, to face and live with the complete truth. Battered and bruised, you returned to the rebellion shaken to your core, tasked with picking up the broken remains of your previous perceptions and fitting them back together in a way that made sense.
It seemed all but impossible to reconcile the legendary figure that shaped Anakin Skywalker with the monster you knew Darth Vader to be. They were entirely dissonant, facts that could not possibly exist in harmony, despite the way the Force screamed that they did. You struggled with it for far longer than you cared to admit, that denial and despair hanging over you like the clouds you had nearly fallen into, refusing to dissipate as they obscured your path to clarity. Stubbornness played a role in keeping those clouds in place, the juvenile part of you that longing for your father to sweep in and gather you in his arms and refusing to accept that the man you’d looked up to could be capable of such atrocities. It clung to that notion so desperately, unwilling to let that part of you go, but your stubbornness could not stand against the truth forever. You knew you could not remain a boy forever.
No, you needed to become a man, and that path seemed lined with pain and heartache. Yet it was through that pain that you at last parted the clouds and found the clarity you so desperately needed. Your pain spoke to a pain within Vader, old and scarred but ever present, and you knew that the bridge between the two pieces that made up your father could only be constructed by pain and heartache of his own. A hero vaulted into legend could not descend into darkness without his own brand of suffering, and as each piece of the puzzle that was your father fit together, you came to a realization.
If Darth Vader had been Anakin Skywalker once, then he had been good once, and he could be good again. He was simply a man – one who had been great, long ago – who fell down a path of suffering and hatred, a path anyone (including yourself) could fall victim to. He was hurt, he needed help, and it fell to you to be the one to help him.
The pyre continues to crackle before you, its light flickering and dancing across your eyes as it consumes the last vestiges of a man who lived a life of pain and servitude, granted freedom at last in the final act that had led to his death. It is in this last goodbye, in his last moments and his passing into the Force, that you know your father best. At last, you understand him in a way you never thought you could…
In a way that only you could.
And now, all you can do is stand in the forest on your own, paying private tribute to both pieces of a man the galaxy either loved or despised. A silent eulogy rings in your thoughts, shared between you and the Force alone – and, almost certainly, your father. This moment is meant solely for you, and it stretches on as the flames burn and burn and burn until they begin to grow dimmer, fading with an air of finality. The raging celebrations in the distance beckon to you, but you stand for just a while longer. This moment is meant solely for you, and you mean to cherish it for everything it carries. It is your final moment with your father, the final moment in which everything fits together just so, and you hold on to it, if only for your own sake. You’ve earned that much.
In the end, through the haze of pain and exhaustion that threatens to overtake the adrenaline still coursing through your veins, it is love that roots you to the spot to watch the dying embers crackle around the ash that once was your father. It is love that won the day, you’re certain, and it is love that will rebuild the galaxy. They may not know it yet – and perhaps they never will – but you’re certain that this love will strengthen the Light and raise a new dawn upon a galaxy that has known only darkness for so very long. There are few who will know the truth, even fewer who will understand, but you are content to accept your role as the one to honour your father and carry his legacy as inspiration and warning. This is your destiny, written in the Force since before you were born, and you will bear it so long as the people remember the names of Skywalker and Vader.