I haven’t kept up with the blog, I know.  Every time that I look on my WordPress page, I see the neglected URL looking back at me.  I had the best intentions when I started it; writing about the most wonderful man I’ve ever known.  It was my best intentions, I swear.

I guess it was because losing Dad two years ago wasn’t the only wound that was opened.  There had been a wound festering for years, and reflecting on the loss of my Dad opened it again.  It was the continuation of where my story left off the last time I wrote…it was the wound that my sister, brother and myself had to deal with after our parents ripped our lives apart.  We were just children, unarmed to deal with the reality that we were thrown into, lacking the maturity and experience to be able to navigate what we were forced experience…but somehow we made it.

After I escaped my childhood home at 18, with a shiny new high school diploma in my hand, I didn’t leave home to start my new life…I ran like hell.  I ran to escape the anger and neglect that my mother subjected me to daily – for years – because she couldn’t cast it at my father directly because he’d happily remarried and had built a wonderful life with a step mother that I adored; I was the chink in his armor and she used it the best she could.
When I ran, they both lost me, but Dad had the benefit of frequent phone calls so he at least knew where I was in the world and what I was up to.  Mom got the occasional phone call, mostly because my sister guilted me into it, so she knew that I was alive and progressing.

I spent my twenties trying to validate my childhood to no avail.  A string of bad decisions and bad relationships kept me bouncing around, trying to escape the memories and calm the anger that continued to burn.  I even had a stint of heavy drinking (Jack Daniels was my poison of choice) but one day I had the revelation that Smernof vodka had been the poison my Mom used and since I wanted nothing to be like her, even though I was ironically cursed to look exactly like her, I backed off of it immediately.  Dad would get the play by play phone calls of the struggles that I was having, from whatever state I was living in, but he was helpless…all he could do was apologize for not trying harder to get us away from her.  It wasn’t his fault, he did the best he could back then and I never blamed him for it.  He was the only sanctuary I had in those days and I was thankful for it.

In my late twenties, I’d moved back to where I was from but bad decisions continued.  A horrible relationship that I should have run screaming from ended with a new title for me in my early thirties; “widow”.  At least it didn’t end as he wanted it to, as a murder/suicide, but he played out his role as planned.  It’s too bad his final performance involved a SWAT team from the Sheriff’s Department and me in a bullet proof vest because I was afraid that someone would get shot if he was still alive.  Mom and Dad became civil to each other for my sake because the event was shocking no matter how it was viewed.  I had friends in handy places so it stayed out of the news; my bad decisions didn’t become public fodder for strangers to chew on.  After seven months of intense therapy and reading every book I could find for surviving suicide (I remember making the lady at Barnes and Noble cry after handing her a list of books that my therapist suggest I read as a step to my “recovery”), once again…I ran.  I quit my job, sold my house and ran back into the arms of Mother Blue.  With my two dogs in my Nissan Pathfinder, I said goodbye to my family and drove east to my new life.  There was one problem with this that I was too self centered to see at the time…my abrupt declaration of overcoming my bad decisions devastated my Dad to the point of anguish, but I didn’t realize the depth of what I did to him until it was too late to take it back.

That was my sin; the one regret I have that will haunt me for the rest of my life.  I did that to my Dad after he did nothing but love me, be good to me and take care of me when I needed him…and that’s the demon that’s been chasing me relentlessly since I lost him and probably always will.  It wasn’t the shitty childhood that I was sentenced to or the other trivial crap that I didn’t deserve throughout my life, it was hurting that wonderful man, and breaking his heart with my absence.  I can’t take back the pain that I caused him…the pain he never deserved.

On that note, I will try to keep writing on this blog because there were so many wonderful memories with him.  That’s what it’s all about, right?  Keeping him alive by keeping the memories alive.  I’ll do my best.