June 3

My dad died 21 years ago today. If the day my dad died were human, it could legally purchase alcohol in the United States.

I have been sort of out of it, as usual around this anniversary, for the past 2 days. Anneke’s birthday is tomorrow, and I’m not even able to really think about it, also as usual around this anniversary. I have to get past June 3rd before I can even think about June 4th. I was hoping when she was born that her birthday would make the anniversary easier, but it doesn’t. I have had two children due June 3rd, one alive and one never having lived. I have had one child born June 4th, the day after the anniversary of my dad’s death, who was due June 12th, the day after the anniversary of my dad’s birth. Parse that.

It is stupid for me even to write about this because I could never say anything. I could never address even the minutest instance of my experience or of how it has shaped everything I am or could ever conceive of being. But I have tried to make sense of it in everything I have done ever since, so I try to make sense of it today too.

I have really early memories, so I actually have a few flashbulbs of us all living together before my mom and dad separated when I was about 2. Lots of little moments, really, but more just the feeling that my dad was good, and he loved me.

I know that he felt like he never did a single good thing in his life but help make me. And I know that he felt like he never truly loved anyone but me. He had the saddest life – the very saddest life – so it makes sense that he never trusted anyone, including himself, to do the right thing or to feel the right thing or to know the right thing.

I remember talking to him on the phone once when I was like 8, and he was in a hospital (probably a rehab, but I didn’t know that at the time). When we said goodbye, I said, “I love you,” and he said, “Do you really?” It was startling even then because I knew enough to know what he meant. He could never trust that anyone could love him. In his life, I think he came the closest to trusting me. I’m sure he wanted that desperately.

I was watching “Diff’rent Strokes” when my aunt called and told my mom that he’d died. I even remember my room at the time. My mom called me into her bedroom, and she was shaking. I’ve never seen anyone do that since. Anyway, I remember that her first phrase was, “They found your dad,” and I just knew before she finished saying it. I ran out of her room and out the back door. I don’t even know where I was going.

A couple months earlier, when my grandparents had driven me away from my dad’s apartment at the end of my spring break week with him, I knew, in whatever is the essence of my being, that I would never see him again. I had never cried like that about leaving him before, but I was experiencing the very conscious, overwhelming knowledge that I would never see him again.

He was 33 when he died, just 8 days shy of 34. So young. It makes no sense for someone to die that young, or to leave a child. He killed himself, but a strong case could be made that he did not want to succeed.

I couldn’t help him stay alive, but I was only 11. I had turned 11 just 10 days before… I will never know my dad as an adult. I have memories, and I have what people tell me about him, which is little. Everyone has always assumed that talking about him is off limits, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Every piece of information I get about him, and every story I hear, no matter how seemingly insignificant, gets replayed in my mind time and time again. I’m constantly trying to make sense of him, and of myself both as a human being without a father and as a human being with a father whose suffering was so tremendous that he chose death over continuing on in the world in which I now must live without him, the world in which I renew my choice to continue living without a father every day.

I’ve never faulted him. How could I? I love him, and I respect the choices he made, including the one to end his life. But I also can’t minimize the ways in which that choice have impacted my own emotional health (although this is tangled up with his related genetics) and the choices I’ve made. His death creeps into major decisions for me, like whether and when to become a parent. If I boiled out all the complexities, I know I probably have children now because my dad died when I was 11.

Beyond all this, I just wish he were here. It makes me so indescribably sad that he will never know my children, who he would think were beyond cool. He’ll never know that Anneke has his artistic ability or that Kieran has his intellect. He’ll never know that Griffon, who was named after him, has precisely his hair color. He’ll never know that all three of them have blue eyes, like me, and like him. He’ll never know me as a mother, or as an adult at all, and that makes me really sad for the both of us.

*****

To my dad, I miss you. It’s such a ridiculous cliché to say that I would give anything to see you for even just one more minute, but I would. I am glad for you that you no longer have to live in this world that hurt you; I wish you hadn’t been hurt to begin with. I’m sorry living was difficult for you. I love you, and I know you loved me.