What She Took
For eighteen years I thought he didn't want me.
That was the only explanation available. He wasn't there. Nobody explained why. And when you're a kid trying to make sense of an absence, you fill the gap with what you know, and what I knew, what I had already learned from her leaving, was that there was something in me worth walking away from. So I filed him under the same story. Two parents, same conclusion. The evidence was hard to argue with.
What I didn't know, what nobody told me for eighteen years, was that he had been asking about me. A family member let it slip eventually. He'd see them around town, regularly, and he'd ask. About me. How was I doing. Where was I. He wanted to know.
I remember the feeling when I first heard that. Like the floor had shifted. Because the story I'd been living inside, the one where I was the reason, where something in me had made it easy for everyone to go, that story had a hole in it now. He hadn't gone. He'd been kept away.
She decided he wasn't fit to be around. Alcoholic, she said. Her judgment to make, apparently. Was he without his struggles? No. But that was never her call to make. Not for me. She took eighteen years of a father from me based on a decision I never got a say in, and she did it while walking out the door herself. The audacity.
I found him when I was an adult. I couldn't and wouldn't let it go until I did.
A family member helped me track down an address. We had a lead once before that went nowhere, wrong address, he had already moved on. So when we pulled up to this one I sat in the car with my head swirling. Does he live here? Could this really be it? The anxiety of it was its own thing, all those years of wondering who he was, whether he thought about me, whether he'd want to see me, sitting right there in my chest as I stared at a door.
I somehow got my nerves together and managed to walk up to the door by myself and knock.
He answered. It felt like time stopped. I recognized him instantly. Before I could think I heard myself say it. Hi. I'm your daughter.
Sitting across from him the first time was surreal. I studied his face the way you do when you're meeting someone you've only ever known in photographs, the way he moved, the expressions, looking for the parts of myself I could trace back to somewhere. There was sadness in it. All that lost time sitting right there between us at the table. I could see pieces of myself in him, I couldn't look away. He was complicated. Carrying a lot. You could see it on his face. Years of pain he hadn't put down. We left that evening with a plan to keep in touch and started exchanging letters.
We had about two years.
Near the end the phone calls started to change. He sounded drunk, slurring his words, repeating himself, not making sense. It made me deeply uncomfortable. I'd worried about it, wondered if this was how it was going to go, if I was going to become someone he called regularly like this, rambling and incoherent, and I'd have to sit there on the other end of it not knowing what to do. The thought of it hurt in a specific way, because I had wanted this to work, and the idea that alcohol was going to threaten the new relationship we were trying to form was more than I could hold. I'd drawn the only logical conclusion I could find for what I was hearing and I pulled back. Told myself maybe it was just better not to communicate. Maybe I'd been wrong to hope for more.
It wasn't alcohol. It was morphine. He was so young, dying of cancer and he hadn't told me. A family member of his told me later that for whatever reason, he felt it was best not to tell me what he was facing. I thought I was making the right decision and protecting myself. Finding out the truth later hurt in a way I hadn't expected. I had made a decision without the facts and I couldn't take it back.
By the time I found out he was already gone. The call came, he had passed, been cremated, I was welcome to collect his ashes, here was the name of the funeral home.
I went. Of course I went. The people there spoke to me like I'd known him my whole life and I stood there feeling displaced inside my own grief, not sure what I was supposed to feel or what I'd earned the right to feel. I took him home.
He lived in a cabinet for sixteen years.
I spent more time with him as ashes in that cabinet than I ever did while he was alive. He moved with me to multiple locations.
I didn't know what else to do with him. He wasn't these ashes. The essence of who he was had already been gone from my life long before I brought that box home. What I was holding was something I couldn't quite name and didn't know what to do with. So he stayed in the cabinet and I lived my life and we just existed like that for a long time.
A family member of his gave me his end of life journal eventually, hours of his voice, his reflections, his memories, his childhood, his life. I couldn't wait to listen. I was going to finally know him, all the parts that two years of letters hadn't reached.
I listened twice. In over three hours, there was one mention of me. Just that he had a daughter. Something like that.
When I first realized that I felt like my chest had caved in. How did he only mention me once? I felt the shame again of feeling unwanted. It landed exactly where the old wound was, see, he didn't care, not really, you were never the point. I had hoped that the story had changed but there it was again, same story, his voice this time.
Then, years later, I listened again. From a different place. And I heard it from a different perspective.
Three hours of a man's life and almost no mention of his daughter. That could mean she didn't matter. Or it could mean the absence of her was so painful he couldn't go there. That the loss was too much to speak out loud. I'll never know which one is true. But I know he was asking about me in town. I know he wrote me letters. I know he didn't tell me he was dying because he didn't want me to carry it.
He deserves the benefit of the doubt. That's where I landed. It took years of work to get there but that's where I landed.
On his birthday, sixteen years after I brought him home, it finally felt like time. We took him somewhere that meant something and let him go. There was laughter that day, real laughter, the kind that catches you off guard, some genuinely comedic three stooges moments I won't soon forget. I sat there wondering if he would have laughed too. I hope so. Something about that felt right. Felt like him, or at least like the little I knew of him.
I sat there thinking about the eighteen years I spent believing I was the reason he wasn't there. The two years we actually had. The phone calls I pulled back from not knowing he was dying. The cabinet. Something I had been given, his voice, his words. That solitary reference in three hours, the one I carried like a weight for so long, that I finally heard differently after years of work.
She took him from me. She engineered it. Decided on his behalf, and mine, that we didn't get to find out what we might have been to each other. And I spent nearly two decades internalizing it as proof that something was wrong with me. That I was unlovable. Not worth staying for. After a lot of work, I can stand here today and say I know my worth.
He lived a difficult life. Knowing he is no longer struggling, no longer in pain, that gives me some closure.
A little time was better than no time. I'm grateful for that.