My Dad passed away last week. It’s a weird one. We weren’t close, but he wasn’t a villain in my life. He and my Mom split when I was a baby and he hightailed it for home (Detroit). In the arc of good dads/bad dads I had it better than a lot of people and knowing what I know now, I think if he’d been forced to stick around things would’ve been a lot worse. I ended up with a fantastic mom and a pretty good fatherhood template to ignore in raising my own kids.

When I was younger, I resented him. Then I did some digging/therapy/questioning in my 30s in which my Mom revealed to me that Dad had more than a few mental health issues. Since then I’ve been at peace with it all. He didn’t have the tools to be a father, that’s not his fault. Sidenote: Also, very impressed with my mom for being extremely diplomatic about that when I was young and impressionable. She could’ve used that information when I was growing up and it probably took a lot of restraint not to.

Anyway… thinking about my Dad and his passing has been surprising. I was completely caught off guard by how emotional i was when I got the call to get on a plane as soon as possible. Then I realized it wasn’t my dad I was mourning, although I am sad that he’s gone. I think, despite everything I knew about him, I was still mourning “what could have been.” The door of “good dad” whatever that means was closing permanently. The sliding doors scenario where he called me one day and we spent a few years having a cool as hell father/ son relationship where we did a lot of cool father/son shit (golf? smoking meats?) and he maybe, just maybe, just mmmmmmmaybe said “hey, sorry about that” was never happening. I didn’t think I needed to hear that and in the long run I didn’t, but in the moment, I really did.

Ultimately, while sitting in the hospital next to my unconscious father, my step-mom gave me that sorry on his behalf. She told me more about his mental health journey, though not much and I reflected a lot on how lucky I was that she came into his life and MY life as a kid. The awkward visits to Detroit were made better by having a third person there who wasn’t guilt riddled or a little kid who didn’t understand.

When asked about my dad I’ve always told people he’s a decent guy who happens to be pretty odd. He was very funny and I think I got a bit of that from him. Once while waiting to meet him for dinner, a girlfriend who had never met my father, pointed across a busy courtyard and said “that’s him.” So I look like him, too. He gave me a lot. My life has been good, exceptional even, and all of those things change if my father was a different father. I don’t really want for him to have given me “more” because I got so much and there would’ve been different kinds of pain if he had.

I used to joke that for every 2 days I visited my dad we’d watch 3 movies. We both had a lot of trouble getting a conversation going and movies were at least something that could inspire conversation: “I liked it.” “I didn’t.” We once watched a Canadian movie about a kid coming home to see his estranged dying father (I cannot seem to remember the title) and that was a pretty short conversation (“the Canadian independent film scene is turning out some interesting stuff!”). Anyway, sitting in the hospital with him knocked out I sent a text to my wife: “One last awkward silence with my father.” I always felt so weird when I visited, though I tried my best not to. I think he was trying his best, too.

I don’t know that I have a point, I just felt the urge to write SOMETHING about him. He was a decent guy with demons who gave me a life that I am so grateful for having. I hope he was happy, too. I was never really sure.