part 40 (if it's not a tome yet, i guess i don't know what a tome is)

My dad taught me that he determined who I was. He was in charge of defining me. I wonder a lot why I was always so desperately drawn to him – I suppose because I was uneasy not knowing who I was at any given moment and I needed him to figure it out. I don’t know.

What I do know is that I work really, really hard every single day at knowing how to define myself, at least to the degree that I can have my feet on the ground on a consistent basis. In learning how to define myself, I lost my need for my dad.

It sounds callous. I keep wondering if I am just in shock. But then I start thinking about what and who he was to me. Was there really anything there that I could cherish or miss now that he’s dead? Everything I ever loved about him was all in my mind – the dad I had in my mind was not the person my dad actually was.

The person my dad actually was did not offer anything of himself beyond the willingness to be in charge of defining who I am.

I think about my dad and when I was growing up and about the feelings I felt for him. I hugged him and told him I loved him. I made him father’s day presents and birthday cards. I wrote notes to him when I was away, or when he was sick. I held his hand. I wore his old shirts. I missed him when he was gone.

Actually, I didn’t really miss him. I always missed my mom, but I seemed to do just fine when my dad was gone. This troubled me. When my mom was gone overnight – even just one night – I would cry and cry and cry and miss her with every ounce of who I am. But when my dad was gone? Even for weeks or months or in and out and between?  Nothing.

I remember lying in bed one night, maybe I was about 9 years old, when my dad was out of town, and it occurred to me that I didn’t feel so bad when he was gone. I tried to get really sad about him, and even shed some tears, but I just didn’t care that much that he wasn’t there. I felt guilty. I began to construct an affection for him commiserate with the adoration and love I had for him, or with the adoration and love I wanted him to believe I had for him – probably the adoration and love I wanted to believe I had for him, too.

If he adored me and loved me, then that would mean I was someone who could be loved and adored. Since I found out he died (the day before yesterday), I have been wondering who else that man was to me. I can’t think of anything.

I have really been trying, too. I keep going back to the moments that used to make my heart break over and over again, the moments in which I could define him as a loving father. I get a little pang of sadness, then I remember what motivated that moment or what followed or preceded it. I honestly cannot think of a time when my dad acted in any way altruistically. It was always about what he could get out of it.

The moments preceding and following those heartbreakers are now vivid recollections of abuse and violence. And then it’s back to, “thank god he’s dead,” and a whoosh of relief blows a big wad of anxiety out of my body (from my brain to my chest and then out the bottom of my feet, in case you were wondering).

He was like make-believe snakeskin. He and I were the only ones who thought it was real, and it was wrapped around me so tightly I could hardly breathe. And then I realized the snakeskin wasn’t real, so I shed my dad as a snake would shed its skin. And guess what? I’m not even a snake under all of that imaginary reptilian skin.

It seems so simple when I look at it that way. I guess stepping back and having a chance to look at where I am now in comparison to where I have been, and at the possibilities of where I could go, can be summed up that succinctly – my dad made me believe I could not be anything without him (which is an incredibly shitty thing to do to anyone, let alone your own child), and when I figured out it was not true, I left him behind.

That’s what I feel like when I think about my dad being dead. It makes sense to me, it seems logical. I know that there have been days and weeks and months and years of pain that I have struggled and scraped and scratched through to get here. But now I’m here.

It just so happens that I got here around the same time my dad dropped dead.

Every now and then, for a flittering of seconds, I think that maybe I was wrong – maybe my dad was not really the monster I had made of him in my mind, and now that he is dead, I will never be able to find out if it’s true or not. I had decided he couldn’t have any more chances with me, and now that he’s dead I’m wondering what might have happened if I had held out one more chance to him.

But I already know the answer to that: nothing. He would have never even cared to know that chance existed, and here I would be reaching out, offering another chance to the man who raped and tortured me over a period of fifteen years. How sick is that?

A friend of mine reminds me that I am not omnipotent. She reminds me of that when I talk with certainty about how my dad might be hurting other people. She might remind me here that not only do I lack omnipotence, I also do not have the ability to see what may have been in alternate realities that might one day be really real.

But none of those alternate realities has ever become really real, and I am still in a world where my dad did the things he did and I am the child he did them to. It doesn’t change. What has already happened doesn’t ever change. Ever. At all.

Of course I don’t know that the past will always remain the same – who am I to claim complete understanding of the physical and spiritual worlds?

But for me, right now, I know that the past will never change. And maybe tomorrow or next week I will crumble into a million pieces grieving him, but right now I’m still very relieved and happy that my dad is dead.