Je t'aime, toujours

Happy death day to my father.

One year ago today, I got the call that he had succumbed to covid, exactly ten days before his 58th birthday. My feelings were complicated, and they still are. I hadn’t spoken to him in months. He had reached out mid-2021 to express that he hoped me and my children were safe, and that he “didn’t want any harm” to come to us with everything that was going on in the world at that time. My response to him,

“You are the harm. Leave us alone.”

Harsh? Perhaps. But I was harsh in the intrest of protecting myself. Arguably, no one has done more harm to me than my father with the possible exception of my mother. He was incredibly manipulative and he was very smart, and he was my father so I loved him and trusted him over and over again and over and over again he used me, hurt me, traumatized me. I’ll never know who I would’ve been if I didn’t bear the weight of his wounds to this day.

Telling the story of he and I would take far more time than I am willing to divert from my life right now. I have things to do today. I have a life to live. My life, built in the ashes of the person her burnt to the ground, whose ashes he trampled. I’m proud of my life. It’s a hard one, but it is good. I am surrounded by people whose motives I can trust. I am loved by people who see me, completely and put no conditions on the love they offer and I am able to love them back without fear of that love being weaponized againt me. Nobody hurts me, physically or otherwise. Nobody calls me names. I am held and protected and valued. As a broken adult, I sought out all the things I had longed for as a child and I have them now. I live my wildest dreams on a daily basis. It’s never easy but I am so grateful for every single day. I am so lucky.

My actual dreams, the ones I have at night during REM sleep, are consistently haunted by my father though. For the past year, I have dreamed of him at least four times a week, if not more. It’s strange and frustrating because it is very rarely my actual father. Before he died, on the very rare occasion he made an appearance in my dreams, he was…himself, he was cold to me. He would ignore me. If there was a monster in the dream I was trying to protect us all from, he was the one who didn’t believe me when I said the monster was coming. He was the one who convinced other people not to believe me and not to care. Since his death, however, I dream of this strange man who is extremely interested in me. He is loving. He is devoted. In my monster dreams, he is now the one doing all he can to protect me, willing to sacrifice himself for me. The man I dream of is devoted and sincere. It’s a mindfuck and I find it irritating. It makes me miss a man who didn’t exist. It makes me long for the possibility of “what if”. He was never gonna be that person, I know he wasn’t, he was who he was for too long to just up and change 50+ years in. That wasn’t going to happen…and yet, I still feel robbed of the possibility. I sit here now with tears rolling down my cheeks, not mourning him, but mourning what he never was and never will be.

He did so much damage to people and animals I loved, he did so much damage to ME, that there will always be a part of me that is glad he’s gone. There will always be a resolute part of me that solemnly nods and answers with “Good.” when I think of my father the fact that he’s dead. I accept that. In accepting that though, I have to make my peace with the fact that there will always be a part that loves him and misses him and yearns for the person he could’ve been.

I love you, you mean, vicious, selfish, fuck. I love you, Daddy.