Ack. Mumph.
I won’t be posting much about the war for a while – there are plenty of other people out there who are keeping much closer tabs than I on developments – as I found out yesterday morning that my father died on December 18, 2002. Three months ago.
Nobody. Fucking. Told. Me.
My aunts, my father’s sisters, knew where to reach me had they chosen to. The last time I spoke with my father he informed me that I’d been named executrix of his will. Apparently that changed at some point. Obviously we weren’t in any kind of close contact, but still… as all three of you know, I consider irony to be a core component of any significant experience, and this is a rich one. Every so often I’d Google my father to see what he was up to, keeping tabs from a distance. I’d been wanting to get in closer touch with him recently, but was waiting until the dust settled somewhat from my divorce before tipping that moldy can of worms out into the sunlight. Ironically, every time I typed his name in, I’d be cringing in the back of my brain, hoping that since he was only in his early sixties, it wouldn’t be his obituary reporting on his recent activities. This time it was.
I’m just beginning to deal with and process the litany of old and new pain, anger and regret. So many things that I regret that can never be cleaned up. I had begun to blog about all of it, to clean it out of my brain, but Blogger ate my post and my heart is too tired at the moment to recreate everything I wrote. Suffice to say that I most regret maintaining distance between us out of the desire to protect myself from being hurt and to punish him for hurting me – he wasn’t there when I almost died, and I wasn’t there when he did. In many ways this has been the easier path. But it’s certainly not the more honorable.