Gone. Just like that. It was not entirely surprising - he'd had some health issues, some very serious and recent. Only a couple months prior, he'd had a pulmonary embolism in Wal-Mart, of all places, and been rushed to the emergency room. A long hospital stay had followed, and then he'd gone home. He'd had a heart valve replaced a couple times, and had spent a very long time at the bottom of a bottle. But still.
We hadn't spoken in years. Grown apart. It had gotten to the point where it seemed like every time he called, he was drunk and awful. Hateful to the entire world. I didn't want to deal with it, and I didn't want my family to have to deal with it. So I didn't. That version of my dad, I did not mourn.
I mourned the man he had been in my memory, years earlier. And I had done my mourning some time before, because I knew that man was never coming back.
My dad had been the one who had introduced to me to so many of my nerdy pursuits. Star Wars came out the year I was born, so I grew up with him playing the soundtrack (on vinyl, naturally) for hours on end. I used to dance to the Cantina song. Dad had been so excited about the movie coming out that he had researched which movie theater in Indianapolis would be showing it in Dolby Surround Sound.
He made sure I had a version of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - the book-and-record versions of the Rankin Bass animated movies. I listened to those so many times, terrified of Gollum and in awe of the bravery of the hobbits. Gollum's invisibility with The Ring scared me the most; we lived in an old house with glass doorknobs, and to the eye of a four-year-old, the bolt in the center of the knob could be Gollum's pupil.
He taught me to be curious about the world around me and encouraged me to read everything I could get my grubby little paws on. His background was in forestry, so we went for countless walks in the woods of Indiana, where he taught me about the plants and animals that called them home.
He could be so funny, too. We would laugh until we cried; until our bellies hurt and we couldn't breathe. It was harder to be serious than it was to make each other laugh. He taught me how to tell a really good story and enthrall the listener.
He took me to another country to live. I learned another language, learned to love adventure and the unknown, learned to love jumping in with both feet. He taught me that even though you might drink your regular coffee black, you ought not to do that with espresso. He taught me that in love, to do what felt right, because in the end, you should be able to be proud of your choices, whether that was to say no, or to say yes.
That's the man I can see through the lens of nostalgia. I choose not to dwell on the alcoholism that cost him many jobs; on the extreme narrow-mindedness that I discovered. After I became an adult, I got to see my father's racism, anger issues and substance abuse more clearly. He had become someone I was ashamed to be related to, not the person I eagerly introduced to friends. I like to think that he hadn't always been that bad. It had been in maybe the last 15 years of his life that he really changed, got darker inside. I will never really know for sure if that darkness had always been lurking but kept hidden for the sake of his kids, or if I'd merely overlooked it. But I do know the spark disappeared, and when I saw it extinguished, that's when I did my mourning.
So, when my brother called a year ago, I cried some. Not a lot. I went to the funeral home, but did not attend the memorial service. I didn't really feel like it was necessary. I still don't. "My Dad" passed from this world a long time ago. It was only last year that everyone else noticed.
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