An open letter "To Daddy"

Dad:

No "Dear Dad" or "Dear Father" because either you were couldn't accept "terms of endearment" or you didn't want them from me. Or maybe you thought I wasn't sincere the time I told you that I loved you or spent all those years trying to figure out and then trying to be what you wanted me to be - and failed. Or maybe you just didn't like me and I didn't like you.

It'll be 12 years this April since my sister, your oldest daughter, called me long-distance and told me she saw in the morning newspaper that you died two days earlier. Only one of your 11 kids was at your bedside in your home when you died, and she was the only one listed in your obituary as a surviving child. I wasn't hurt or even surprised that I wasn't named as a son in your obit. After all, it'd been - what? - 16 or 17 years since I'd last seen you and longer since I'd even talked to you. I'm sure there are reasons that none of your other surviving kids were listed, but that's between you and them. Maybe because it'd been so long since we even talked to each other, maybe to my discredit, I didn't feel a sense of loss or hurt when I heard you died. But I certainly wasn't happy or, unlike my older sister, thought karma had finally caught up with you and bit ya' in the ass.

Instead, I felt regret - regret that I certainly was a failure as a son, regret that I couldn't be what you wanted, regret that your death meant there really would be no chance of a reconciliation or whatever. Regret that I was out of "maybe tomorrow's" to try to reach out to you. I guess I took it for granted there was always a "maybe tomorrow." If it's any consolation, though, I felt the regret with the same intensity of passion that comes with most of my feelings. You think maybe because I've always felt things so intently, that that's where you and I went wrong? I don't know.

So many things flashed in my head in a micro-second when I heard you died - the day when I was 5 1/2 years old and you picked me up and threw me through the picture window at the house on Brandon Street for walking around the block at kindergarten the day after Martin Luther King died, the "whopping" a couple of months later because I walked away from a Ku Klux Klan march downtown and didn't salute the Grand Wizard or Grand Lizard or Grand Poobah or whatever they called him. Or the whinching pain of that knife you cut into my leg when you kicked me out of the house when I was 14. And all those other "whoppin's" through the years when you were drunk, how many times being called a "f**kin' faggot" when I didn't even know what a faggot was. At least I knew you meant black people when you called me a "ni**er" lover." I stopped counting the number of times I was awakened by screams from the other kids at 1 and 2 in the morning when you started beating up Mom.

I couldn't think of a really good memory to romanticize, Dad, again probably to my discredit, when my sister she told me you died. But I told her something I'd said to so many others for years before you died - say what they did about you, for 11 kids, you were one hell of a provider. Until I hit the streets when I was 14, I don't remember being hungry or sleeping anywhere without heat.

It got back to me that you weren't surprised when you heard that I'd started seeing a shrink in my late teens. "He's f**kin' crazy anyway," is what got back to me. I was. Ironic, isn't it, that after all the years of seeing what booze did to you and what it made you do to other people that I followed in your foosteps right behind you as a full-fledged drunk? Remember when I tried to kill myself with an overdose of my medications because dying was the only way I knew to stop drinking and you told Mom you wouldn't come to the hospital to visit "a go**amn faggot and dope fiend?" For some reason, Mom told me what you said when she told you I tried to kill myself. By then, I didn't care why she told me or why you said what you did. After I woke up alive, I decided it was time for me to "grow up." No one and nothing mattered except for me to get myself together. And I understood, maybe for the first time, that I was alone.

You'll get a kick out of this one, Dad. Years later, after I'd sobered up long before, I had to see another psychiatrist after I shot one of two would-be home invaders with his own gun. At one of the therapy sessions, I brought up a dream I had the night before, about some man I didn't know telling me when I was a kid that he wanted to adopt me. I remember sighing real deep and asking the shrink why I was "putting myself through this again." Know what he said? He thought my dream meant that I'd returned grown up to myself as a child to tell the kid he was okay, that he could be loved by someone. There's that look on your face, Dad, one I've seen so many times. You don't have a clue, do ya'? Well, it was big revelation for me, Dad. It was then that I was able to say good-bye to you.

Dad, so many times I asked myself why you and I never hit it as father and son. It sounds like I'm "blaming" you here, but I'm not - really. I've wondered if something genetic made me think and act opposite of what you did, or maybe I defied you and rejected everything you stood for just to piss you off? I know I actually did decide as a kid to do whatever I could to get you mad (apparently for the hell of it) - but I didn't understand until years later that some of that crap hurt you. And, as God is my witness, I never wanted to hurt you - really. Piss you off, yes. But hurt you, no.

Dad, long before you died, I forgave you for what you did or didn't do. I had to. I had to forgive myself, and I couldn't do that until I cleared whatever bad feelings I might have harbored against you and anyone else. If it helps, I'm still working on forgiving myself. Every once in a while, out of the blue, I remember something I pulled to "get you" - and it's like an arrow through the heart, an actual physical pain. Like the father, the son still has some demons, I guess.

My sister mentioned there was a recent photo of you in your obituary. I asked what you looked like, and Vicki said she wasn't "sure" but thought she saw a near smile on your face. I told her - and I mean it as sincerely today as I did then - that I truly hoped you'd found something to smile about in your last years, that you'd found some the peace that eluded you for so long. My sister disagreed and hoped you'd suffered for years because of "everything." I told her to let it go, that feelings of resentment of hate and bitterness become a cancer that consumes us. She never talked to me about you after that, not once until her own death not quite six years after yours.

You were never one for patience, so I'll wrap this up and let you get on your way. I'm not going to tell you, Dad, that you did this or that wrong, that you were a miserable father or that you made me hate you. You didn't. I never hated you. I can admit now, though, that I was a rotten son, a disappointment to you and that I would not do again so many things I did if there were second chances. Who did what to who or who didn't do what doesn't matter anymore, Dad. It's long past time that both of us just stop it. I need to find my own place here in whatever life I have left, and you need - you can - find the peace and rest where you've gone. I honestly and sincerely pray you are at peace and rest. God knows, you hurt enough in this life.