Tomorrow is my dad’s funeral and I won’t be there. That was hard to write and alarmingly final. It’s not that I don’t want to be there because I do, I can’t go because it will be similarly to my brother’s funeral in a sense only my dad could understand. He didn’t attend his own son’s funeral because he was so full of hatred for someone who didn’t deserve it that he knew he would cause a scene with his words, so he left town after spending time with him before he was cremated. Weirdly that’s what I’m doing with the only difference being the direction of the hatred pointed at me, from people who have never even sat down and had a conversation with me.
Hatred from people who my father led to believe was a daughter he loved very much and was proud of. A daughter who actually spent her entire life wondering if her dad ever loved her as much as he said because he wasn’t around much. A daughter who has decade long gaps in memories of him. A daughter who was finally strong enough to sit him down and ask him the questions her brother always wanted to ask only to find out he wasn’t sorry for anything he did or said in his life, which would have broken her brother’s already broken heart even more.
It sure broke mine. It was hard to sit there and hear him say “I’m not sorry”. I felt like I’d wasted my entire life waiting for a dad I was never going to get.
What hurt worse was knowing he hid what kind of a father he really was so that people would look at me with anger and resentment instead of where it truly lies. It hurts knowing not a single one of his friends knew how to get a hold of me, or even knew my name, it hurts knowing that the ones who do know my name and how to reach me didn’t. They shunned me instead of asking for my version. I was the child. We were his children. He was our parent. Yet not a single one of his “friends” have ever gotten to know his children.
He always said his life was his show. He was right, it was a show and he was the star of it and all shows must come to an end eventually.
I’ll grieve my dad in private and if anyone wants to know what it was like having him for a father I’m always happy to talk about him.
I can’t go to his funeral and feel the anger of people who don’t want to know me. I can’t put myself in a place that can cause my immune system to work harder than it already is, I’m trying to stay alive as long as possible.
I’ll miss my dad, the dad I saw glimpses of, the dad he was when he wasn’t angry, when it was just us, the dad he was when he first became a dad.
My Life, My Story 
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