he may have died a happy man, rather than one full of regret and self-loathing.

When I think about this, I imagine my father, with loving family around his deathbed, and his children holding his hands.  My father did have loving family around him that day, but he died alone, in his sleep later that night.  Which is good, I suppose.  I watched my father die once.  He just...stopped breathing.  I thought to myself, "This is it.  There is where he dies."  I was ready to accept it.  It was shocking, but not as bad I had once thought.  To watch the man you called Daddy take a breath in,  then out, then...nothing.  His battle was over, even though his battle with cancer only started a month prior, his bigger battle was finally over.

But he didn't die that day.  No, they did a suction on his lungs and he woke up enough to eventually go home and die a few weeks later at home, in his sleep.  He was grumpy after that.  So very grumpy.  He yelled at the ambulance drivers who took him home for the ride being "bumpy".  He grouched at everyone, and hardly talked to me at all.  I was at home when he died, with my then (dumbass) husband and 2 year old son.  When I got the call, it was 1am.  My mom's number came up in the caller ID.  I picked up the phone.

Me: Hello

Mom: *silence*

I knew he was dead.  And that was it.  The batter was now finally over.

Life was a constant battle for my dad.  As a baby he was given up for adoption when he was born because his father had died in WWII and having other children, his mother could not take care of him.  He was then adopted into a severely narcissistic, abusive family.  Then they adopted his sister, and then a year or so later, VOILA!  Mama is pregnant!  So when mama had the baby boy, they (my dad and his sister) were sent away on a train, alone, to stay with people, so mama could have time alone with her new bouncing, baby boy!!

My dad and his sister cried the whole way, thinking they were being given away, because now mama had a REAL child, and they, the impostors, were not needed anymore.

I want to cry as I type that.  I can't even imagine for a moment what that was like for them.  Hugging each other on the train, not knowing what would come next: whether or not they still had a home or if their mother still even wanted them.  To question their mother's love them???  What a fucking whore.  I seriously want the ability to raise people from the dead, just to punch them in the face, which is SO what I would like to do to her.

Then as they got older, mama started working for this gigantically fat man (I only say this because as a child he was the biggest man I'd ever seen), whom she promptly started fucking.  He bought her jewelry, took her on vacations, and everyone knew they were having an affair, and she flaunted it in front of her husband's face.  She'd bring her boss home for dinner with everyone there.  The kids knew what was going on, and hated them and their father, who did nothing about it, for it.  Eventually she and her husband divorced (and I assume SHE divorced him, because he would just sit there and let her do whatever she wanted and would not stand up to her at all) and she married her boss.

The kids were almost grown and HATED their new "stepfather".  Once, my father opened the basement door as his "stepfather" was coming up the stairs and hit him square in the face with the backside of said door, knocking the man to the floor.  "Oops," he said, as he peeked around the corner, which what I can imagine as a snicker beneath his breath.  Vindication!  Even if only for a moment!

From there, he started dating my mother in high school when he was a senior, she was 15 and he was 17.  When he graduated high school, he promptly joined the airforce.  Everyone in the community knew his mother was a "tramp" and everyone was always talking about it, so why not leave?  Then, when my mother turned 19 and my dad 21, my parents got married.  Their first year of marriage my dad was stationed in Thailand for Vietnam.  During that time, my dad wrote to my mother constantly, including love poems.  I was always shocked at the content.  Not because it was sexual, but because it was real, loving, and intimate.  It was a side of my father, a man unable to express his feelings in any manner, putting down his heart on paper, so very elegantly and sweetly.  (sidenote, my mother destroyed these letters after my father's death, something I still haven't gotten over...even though the letters were hers to destroy, they were a part of my history I would have liked to keep)

After that, my dad worked for Coke as a truck driver.  He also worked at the airport fixing airplanes.  Then eventually he became a local truck driver, which he was for around 40 years, working 80 hours a week.  I have no idea why my dad felt he needed to work that much, I am assuming my mother pushed him to it, so she could stay home with their child (they adopted me back in the late 70's) after a stillbirth/miscarriage.

My father would get up at 4 am or earlier for work, come home at 6pm or later.  I hardly saw him.  When I did, he was drunk most of the time, esp. on the weekends.  Where was this man who pledged his love in love letters, written songs and poems?  Where was this young kid who was a "riot" in Latin class (which is what I learned recently from a yearbook that was given to me by a family member), who made these other kids' lives worth coming to school every single day?  School probably was his ONLY outlet for fun growing up. 

A happy, go lucky kid, could have stayed a happy go lucky adult, had he only found the right woman to be with.  A non-abusive woman who loved him more than she loved herself.  Instead, he married a woman who ONLY loved herself (or actually, she loved nobody, not even herself).  In every aspect of the idea except literally, he married his mother.


I imagine what his life would had been like had he just been with another woman.  He could have kept up with his music (he was a wonderful and talented musician, who, when I was growing up, only played when he was wasted, BUT was in a very popular band in high school, and was friends with a very globally popular band at that time-before they were famous), and he could have had a job he loved.  He could had been happy.  He may have never started drinking (he grew up from age 17 on being around my mother's Swedish family who drank like they were Irish, so it was all he saw--deal with your problems by drinking them away!).  He may still had gotten stomach cancer (though I doubt it, as I really blame the drinking that caused his acid reflux which in return, caused his cancer), but at least he have died with less regret.  Sure, he'd still have regret, we all do, but he beat my mother regularly when drunk and mentally tormented me and I can't say you'd have much more regret than that, other than murdering people.  He wasted his life, and he knew it, which caused him to have copious amounts of depression his entire adult life.  Being drunk was the ONLY way to combat that and feel semi-normal.

On the flipside, we could say that he may still have had depression....he may still had found his way to the beer can, and he may still have been abusive to a good woman, rather than to a woman who was more abusive right back to him.  So who knows?

But I still feel for him.  And I still can't imagine the things I don't know about (like what else went on in his life that I don't know about).  I know he didn't deserve this life.  He deserved better.  Not that abusing us was okay, it wasn't.  But I can see the pattern that caused it.  And he didn't deserve to subjected to that way of life and biology that caused him to be who and what he was.

I am going to look up his family.  Check out his adoption records, find his brothers and sisters.  I want to know my dad.  Even the parts of him he never knew.  He was never okay with being adopted, but I am.  And I am okay with him.  We are okay.  He's been dead 15 years (it feels like 5 at times, and other times it feels like forever, another lifetime ago) and now I think I'd like to look up his family and know where he came from.  Maybe I'll find answers to why he was the way he was?  Maybe I won't.  Doesn't matter.  To know is to understand and I am more about understanding people than to hate them.

One day I'll look to understand my mother.  But for now, I'll start with my dad.  And that's enough.


So, had my father escaped the abuse?  I would have never known him.  My kids would not be alive today.  So I have a lot to thank his existence for.  But it's still not fair.  The only fair thing is that he existed at all.  Because of him, I am who I am today.  Some good.  Some bad.  But aren't we all?