I wish I had a didactic memory, that I was able to recall with precision every moment of my life.  But I don’t.  If my memory was any type of photograph, it would be a faded Polaroid stored carelessly in a closet box.  The memories I do have are blurry, captured moments shaded by whiteness.  These are the things I remember.

I got Christmas presents from you when I was young.  I believe my mother actually addressed them from you, but at this point I don’t recall if that is a memory or something  that actually happened.

The first time I remember seeing you, meeting you, was when I visited you in Las Vegas.  I think it had to be 1979 or 1980.  I remember being in a casino and being a little shit and reading my stepsister’s diary and talking about it and I remember discovering you kept nude photographs of your wife/ex-girlfriends.  Apparently I had quite the thing for snooping when I was younger.  I remember we went to a drive-in movie.  I think Zulu Dawn was playing on our screen, as well as some other movie I no longer recall, but there was some type of sex movie being shown on another screen I ended up paying more attention to.  But when I think about you and me, that’s when the photograph fades.  I can’t recall anything particular about the two of us then.

The next time I saw you was at my great-grandmother’s funeral, when we stayed with you for it.   I had to be 15 or 16. Somehow it was agreed that I would spend the summer with you.

I was your son.  But I heard you say that you really didn’t get me.  You felt I was lazy and strange, which was not untrue, but what I was most of all was a teenager, and you hadn’t had much experience with one of those.  It’s almost fitting that of all the things you could have given me, I’m left with this: without you, I would have not been able to be that close to hardcore drugs or VCR porn.  The cocaine never again wandered into my life, but I guess I can thank you for Kay Parker.

I don’t remember how much longer later, maybe a few months or maybe six, but you had agreed to come see me in Arkansas.  The day you were supposed to be there, my mother talked to me after school and said you weren’t going to be able to make it.  I no longer recall if there was a valid reason or not.  Perhaps there was.  I do know that was the last time I cried about you until last night. 

One last memory.  I know you talked to my mother on occasion in the following years, but you and I never talked until 1995 or 1996, when I received a call from you out of the blue.  I know I wasn’t the most cordial.  And I know I took it out on my mother for giving you my phone number.  That was the last contact between us.  It’s amazing to me how often I think of this and wonder if I should have been warmer, more conciliatory.  I had done nothing wrong in our relationship, and yet even now I wonder if I should have done something.

I’ve always defined myself by you, which is similar to defining myself by meteor showers, as both have spent roughly as much time in my life.  I’ve lived my life as “I’m not going to be the father my father is.”  In my late teens and early twenties I created a dictionary’s worth of horrendous poetry, often dedicated to you, to showing you what you missed, to create the violence on paper that stormed through my mind.  Someone told me last year that I shouldn’t let you have that much control on my life, and she was right.  But it was hard. 

I don’t know how I would have felt about you if I hadn’t had a daughter whose mother did the same thing to her that you did to me.  Every day with Robyn, with her wondering why her mother didn’t love her enough to want to be with her, reminded me of you.  No child should ever have to wonder that.  I blamed her mother for that, but I guess I also blamed you too, somehow.

I didn’t know you.  I never spent enough time with you to really know you.  What I saw from you could have been no more than the face you show a co-worker or a stranger on the street.  I never really got to know you, what made you you.  And you never got to know me, either.  You never got to meet your grandchildren.  You weren’t there for birthdays or Christmases or my graduation from high school or college or when I graduated basic training or when I retired from the military or when I married or when I divorced.  You never got to see the man I became, a man that in some way is because of you.

The truth of the matter is that, whether or not we want, our parents have an influence on us.  If we have loving parents, that influences us.  If we have abusive parents, that forms an everlasting impact on us.  When we don’t have a parent, it does, too.  I miss my daughters every day they are not with me, and I could say that is because of you.  I told Robyn today about your passing, and she asked how I felt.  I told her my feelings were confused.  She said, if it were her, she would feel angry.

But I don’t feel angry.  In my life, I’ve longed for your love, for your admiration.  I’ve hated you.  And “hate” is a word I don’t apply to anyone.  But I don’t hate you now.  If anything, I feel sad for you.  To spend over two weeks in a hospital without a member of your family there to help you, care for you, to love you, that fucking sucks.  When I was younger, I, in my writer’s fancy, imagined a deathbed scene in which your dying breath was beat down by my scorn and hatred.  Now I just wish I had been there, that you had somebody for you.

I wish it didn’t take almost two weeks until somebody in your family found out you had died.  Your body already turned to dust.  I think of you, and I think of my son, Dane, and I think of my fear and my hope, burned away in flames. 

I found out shortly after midnight.  I was okay when I called my mother and told her and hung up after saying goodbye and hearing her voice break.  Then I shook.  Tears fell, and I shook uncontrollably.  I thought about how young you were.  You’re only 19 years older than me, and 19 years isn’t much.  It’s just a breath of time.  How can that cover where I am now and where you are?  And all the words I wanted to say...

And I can no longer say.  Except these words.  Whether it would have mattered to you or not, you are forgiven.  Let the flames that shed your skin and the waves that will cover your ashes also take away my anger.  I’ve heard you were a good man.  I’ve heard you were a bad man.  I believe both these things equally.  But you were my father, whether you wanted to be or not.  You were how I came to life, how I came to love, how I came to have my daughters.  So I thank you, no matter how that came to be or whether or not you were in my life.  For me, you did at least one thing right.

I do not know what, if any, afterlife awaits us.  I hope that, no matter what, you are at peace.  Let my hatred rest, let my anger rest, let my sorrow rest...let my father rest.

I am not a hugger.

I don’t really know any reason for this.  Perhaps if I spoke to a therapist about it, he would have some incredible insight into why this is, but that’s not something I really feel the need to investigate.  This is not to say that I never hug, nor that I don’t hug well.  My daughters have been the recipients of good hugs their entire lives.  Every woman I’ve been involved with has been thoroughly hugged.

But with non-child family members and other people, I either don’t hug, or when a hug is required or cannot be avoided, it’s pretty much the same: touching only at the shoulders and only one arm around the back.  It’s not something I consciously do; it’s just something that is.

This does not mean I have problems with intimacy.  In fact, I find as I grow older that intimacy is something I crave more than I did as a younger man (back then, I had no problem with solitude).  Perhaps that is because over the last few years intimacy is something that has been hard to find.

Before mid-2011 my relationship history was quite short.  I’d only dated a few people, and two of them I married.  When my wife and I separated I felt many things, many of which I won’t get into here, but one thing I felt was in need of physical contact, in need of somebody showing me she desired me.  In October and November of that year, I did something I had never really done before.  I don’t know the most accurate way to describe it.  You could say I played the field.  Someone has referred to it as my manwhore phase.  In December I started dating someone, until we broke up in March.  I began seeing someone new in August.  Those were the only two people I had been with since my “phase.”

I talked to a very good friend recently.  She and I became friends during my “phase,” although she was never part of that phase herself.  What I liked about her is that she was going through some of the same issues I was and that we though quite a bit alike.  She is involved with somebody now, and she appears very happy and on the cusp of making a big step forward.  I told her I was happy for her.  And that was the truth.  That was the first thing on my mind and out of my mouth.  Underneath, though...I was...what’s the word here?  Not jealous.  Envious.  I wanted her to have her joy and her love, but part of me whined how come I don’t get that, how come she gets to fall asleep in someone’s arms and someone’s love, when I fall asleep in this king-sized bed.  Alone.  Again.  It’s not that I’m jealous that someone else is with her, or that I don’t want her to be happy.  I just want what she has.

But, you know, with a girl.  I’m sure her guy is great, but I just don’t swing that way.

Not yet, at least.

The thing that I thought about today is that through my “phase” and even when I was dating people afterward, I have, to the best of my recollection, only fallen asleep with someone in my arms only ten nights in almost 19 months.  Three women, ten total nights.  I was in love with one of them.  Another I love to this day still, and I value her as a friend and confidante, but it was easy to understand that we would never be “in love.”  I don’t know if anything would have deepened with the third, but it is a moot point now, as circumstances at the time kept things from growing, and both of us moved on to other things, other people, and she is very happy now, and my happiness for her isn’t even envious (for it occurred at a time when I thought I might be just as happy, if not happier).

That time obviously is only in reference to women with whom I am intimate.  It doesn’t take in last week when my eldest daughter visited, which required the five-year-old to sleep in the same bed as me.  And, believe me, waking up on the edge of the bed with two feet pushing at your head...I can do without that.

I like to think that everybody has those moments in which they look in the mirror and ask the reflection, “what is wrong with you?”  I hope they do; it would be incredibly sad for me to realize it was only me.  I am blessed or cursed with extreme self-awareness.  I know who I am.  I know my good points.  I know my bad ones.  I know the ones that I could overcome and that I probably never will.  I know me very well.  And yet I still look in that mirror and ask that question.  Because my arm reaches out in the night and encounters nothing...except a kitten who thinks I’m trying to play and scratches the shit out of me.

I look at my cat Jaden.  She’s about 13 to 14 years old now.  When she was younger she had very little tolerance for people.  Whenever anybody came in, she would make a run for it and hide.  Nowadays, somebody comes in and Jaden heads right for their lap, as if to say, “here I am.  Pet me.”  Maybe both Jaden and I realize that, while death may not be waiting for us in the night as we rest restlessly, it might!  Is it the thought that I’m mortal that makes me desire intimacy this much?  Has something changed this much in me?  Or have I spent so long the loner that the loneliness has overwhelmed me?  I know so much about me, but this I don’t know.  Maybe I’m just one of millions, of billions, just holding out my arms and asking someone to show me she loves me.

Maybe I just need a hug.