My dad died two weeks ago yesterday. It feels like it was months ago but it was just 14 days ago when I received a letter from a lawyer at 9:06am telling me he had passed at 7am that morning. It felt surreal. It felt empty. It felt sad.

My dad and I had never had the best relationship. A devastating set of events happened between us many years ago and was so incredibly painful I never really recovered and sadly he never understood the pain he caused. I tried several times to extend the “olive branch” but for one reason or another it always ended with us in silence for years and years. We wrote each other off. We both thought and felt we were never destined to reconcile. I thought on the day he died that I would feel nothing because for all intensive purposes he wasn’t in my life and there would be nothing to lose. I was wrong.

I don’t know what made me decide to fly to Florida to handle his affairs within minutes of learning he passed. I just knew that it was the right thing to do – to go there and see for myself who this man was that I hadn’t seen in 17+ years. To see how he lived his last days and more importantly to honor his wishes to be cremated and laid to rest. I hate to say it but more than he had done for me in 20 years.

I arrived in Florida with my husband and it was 4 days of intense pain and sadness that a man who had it all – lived such an incredible life with my mother – died alone, surrounded by pain medication and photos of people who had left this world before him. The little girl in me looked in desperation for a photo of myself somewhere in this little condo. Nothing. I met his neighbor desperate to hear that she knew stories of me or to hear that he has spoken of me – but no, she said to me he said nothing about me ever.

Two weeks later, yesterday his ashes arrived in a box. The end of a life in a cardboard box in an urn that I thought he would love. I haven’t opened the box. I can’t. So it’s sitting with a “human remains” sticker on it in our guest house.

I guess I am writing this because it is so incredible sad. Sad that as an only child and with only one father had no relationship and no connection. That we both for our own reasons allowed fear, anger, resentment, denial to equal no contact and no communication. An email I wrote to him the day before he died offering forgiveness remained unread. Sitting in his inbox in between a Walmart specials ad and a jokes email from a friend he received daily.

To understand my feelings and to get past the anger and pain I need to find the parts of him that made me smile – while there were not many the ones I have are marked in my memories.

He was a guy who wore a t-shirt on our boat that said “LEAVE ME ALONE”.  He doodled on every scrap of paper he could lay his hands on. He was sarcastic and had a great sense of humor. He wore the weirdest clothing – from captain hats to cover his balding head to Kaftans from Beirut, to a uniform of beige from Banana Republic –  while he watched sports in the TV room. He wasn’t a great lover of people – but when he was “on” – he was charming and funny. He loved dogs and every dog we ever had loved my dad more than anyone in our household. He loved old fashioned music and was a fan of the Yankees. He loved to read – mostly crime and political drama. He loved photoshop and discovered later in life how to shave 10 lbs off a photo of you. I should have reconnected with him just so I could look skinnier. He played a game with me as a little girl where he would tell me to make “Jello” … I would run to my play kitchen and make him his Jello and he would always “drop it”, “eat it” “fumble with it” and I would be sent back to my kitchen to make more Jello.  It was a game he played with me and I remember it well. I could make Jello as many times as he wanted it. He was a Blackjack player who counted cards and loved the Casinos.

He was man who lived in revisionist history, could not accept responsibility for his actions and words, he could never admit he was wrong and was a pro at playing the victim. I say this not to speak ill of the deceased but to honor my own real feelings about a man who I just wanted to know as “dad”. And in my land of imagination Dad’s don’t fuck over their kids. They don’t dispose of them. They don’t abandon them for other families. They don’t tell them things they would or should have only told friends. They don’t use you. But life is not fantasy and my reality was a man who just wasn’t kind to me or fair to me.

This experience is teaching me so much about myself and about loss and grief and unresolved issued that should never go untouched. “Life is short”, “not a dress rehearsal”, “live life to the fullest” all quotes I have seen on t-shirts or thrown out in my own conversations. But these quotes do have real meaning.

I don’t know that even with a “come to Jesus” if my dad and I would ever have been or had the relationship I wanted. I am coming to terms with the fact that this was just our karma. Someone said to me recently that “he was able to plant the seed but was incapable of watching it grow or nurturing it while it grew”.  That is something I have found comfort in. It freed me of the responsibility and reminded me that I was the child and he was the dad.

I know this posts lacks my normal sarcastic twist and humor I have always found in even the word of situations but it’s an honest post that I am sharing so that those I love can pick up the phone if they are missing someone, they can resolve issues that they think they have tomorrow to take care of, that maybe someone reading this can gain a little insight into my world of loss and emptiness and please know I am not looking for sympathy or empathy – I will be fine. I am a survivor and always have been. I will find a way to deal with this and put it to bed as I have with other pain in my life.

I also wanted to write this post to honor my mom. She has been my rock. She was essentially a single parent to an adult daughter – actually she was just a single parent when I had two parents. She is my confident, my “only a phone call away”. She listens and allowed me to process this in my own way. She was protective of me through all the years of his hurt and “incidents”. While she and my dad ended their marriage many years ago she knew he was my dad and would always be my dad. She supported me when I tried to reach out but was there to catch me when the reaching out didn’t work out the way I had hoped for. She reminds me everyday that I matter – that I was not just a disposable daughter – maybe not to him but to her and to many many people. She tells me she is proud of me so often and so loudly that it makes up for 100000 parents – not just the loss of 1. My mom is my beacon and she holds the proverbial flashlight so I can see the road ahead is not destined to be gloomy and sad but to embrace the woman I am and have become and life will go on and I will be fine. She reminds me how loved I am and how his actions do not and should not define how I feel about myself. I love her so much and I am so grateful to God that he gave me a parent who has taught me so much about life, myself and about faith. Faith that everything is going to be ok.

Thanks mom – for being my mom, my friend and even in times of pain finding the humor in the insanity. For allowing me to scream and cry and sometimes just to be silent with this “stuff”.

In my own way of coping – I have had my own moments of levity. He’s probably in the Casino part of Heaven, with a dog on his lap and a toothpick in his mouth in lieu of a cigarette,  playing blackjack and bitching about the coffee. He’s probably flirting with a cocktail waitress and telling her stories of his life. He’s probably looking down laughing that I hired “College Hunks who Haul Junk” to clean out his apartment and would remind me that he too was once a College Hunk. Ok sure you were dad… 🙂

I promise to be back to my normal, sarcastic, silly self next post. But life isn’t always Amazon packages and hoarding goats and saving bunnies… well maybe it is – we just saved two bunnies this week – who the fuck eats bunnies??? So please welcome Harvey and Hudson. Life does go on I guess.