When I was seventeen years old I killed my father without a second thought. The little girl I was babysitting asked me where my father was, and rather than go into the whole story about how my parents were separated, and in the past five years I had only seen my father a handful of times, I said, "He's dead."
At the time it was easier to just be done with him; no possibility of complicated intrusions. Now, I'd happily embrace such complexities if it were possible to resuscitate him with an off-hand comment. "Oh, my father? He lives in Florida; fishes all day, dances all night."
The truth was that he lived four hundred miles away and thought of me probably as often as I thought of him. I spent my adolescence learning how to live without him; erasing him from my life. I forgot about the way light danced in his eyes when he smiled. I forgot about how he liked to sing old songs like, “Chances Are,” and “Blue Moon.” I forgot about how when he fried onions and green peppers, the smell reached into every corner of the house and made me feel safe and loved. I forgot all of these things until one day, years later, my mother called to say, “Your father is in the hospital. He has cancer.”
I was twenty then, and in the middle of the worst summer of my life. I was working two jobs and still broke. I was stranded in the middle of nowhere without a car. I was struggling to finish coursework that was months overdue. And to top it all off, I was recovering from a mess I’d made with this guy, who, in hindsight, was so much like my father that it scares me now to think about it.
I felt like I’d already died a little bit that summer, but for some reason I dropped everything—at a time when I was desperately trying to hold on— and flew to the side of a dying man; a man I’d already killed in my memory. After all that time it was the threat of losing him for good that reminded me he was still there. If my mother had said, “Your father is frying onions and peppers. He misses you,” would I have gone?
