A post about my Dad
CW: addiction, death, grief

I was thinking about my Dad this morning, the day after Father’s Day. It's funny how grief works... time goes on and on and you mostly just live your life, but then sometimes it just hits you that you'll never get to speak to them again. Never hear their insanely tasteless jokes that still kinda made you laugh anyway.

Weirdly enough the thing that popped into my head most was a memory of when I was really young, and my Dad taught me to say:

"Here I sit, broken-hearted, tried to shit, but only farted."

At the time, when he passed, I was not on good terms with him. He was not in a place where he could be there for other people, and I was not at a time in my life when I could support him and take care of myself. I was alone in another country doing my PhD just trying to survive. The last thing I ever said to him was "I don't respect you", and when he passed, I didn't mourn for almost a year. I didn't even go to the funeral.

Now, it's as an adult with a much happier and more stable life, and a host of life experience under my belt, that I'm able to appreciate the horror of what he went through. To understand that he was taken by a disease that may have been triggered by the environment and by initial choices he made (or was pressured into), but nonetheless was a terrible disease that he was unable to recover from. Support for people with addiction and/or depression and/or a host of other issues still is so poor in Canada... it was even worse when my Dad needed it most, when he tried to recover the first time, or the second time, or even the third or fourth time.

I'm writing this out, I'm crying a bit, my throat hurts from it for some reason lol. The truth, which I was afraid of then, when he passed, is that I miss my Dad. I miss him a lot. It's just that it was complicated... who is the man I really miss? Was I already missing him while he was still alive, because I felt that I had to cut off contact to keep my own mental health? I wasn't able to mourn him then. After he passed, I was already in the habit of not thinking about it. Then, for years I felt so much guilt, thinking: if only I had been a better, more supportive son... maybe I could have helped him, maybe he’d still be alive now. Truthfully, sometimes I still think this, even though I know it’s not true, it’s not my fault, and really there was nothing I could have done or known to do.

All this is complicated and the truth is simple: I miss my Dad. I miss him every time I think about him. He lives on in my memories, and the shared stories we tell, and my dreams, but I still miss him. I wish he was here today so I could get annoyed at the undoubtedly crappy articles he’d be sending me about crypto, or drug design. Or the random emails he’d send which were just the title and artist of a song, saying: “I think you’ll like this one, it made me think of you”, even though I pretty much never, EVER, liked them lol. He taught me how to fish (mostly), he taught me how to tell jokes, how to laugh at yourself. He taught me gymnastics, then, related, that it was okay to not like things, and that you can decide your own hobbies and interests. He (like my wonderful Mom), always encouraged me to follow my heart and choose my own future. He always told me to be kind, even though sometimes he failed to follow his own advice. He showed me that you can always grow, learn from your mistakes, and try to make things right.

One day, when I was maybe ~10, he asked me to teach him to play Halo on the original xbox. We brought the xbox to the living room, plugged it in, turned off golf (LOL) and turned on the game. The idea of using the joystick to control the first-person perspective of the camera was apparently entirely too much for him, and he ended up looking at the ceiling spinning in circles, while my brother and I joyfully killed him (and each other) over and over. We were bad teachers, but we all laughed so much.

I don’t know what to say, this isn’t a fairy tale, with a moral and a stern warning about your own life. It’s just some stories from mine, and some feelings I need to put out into the world, so other people can know a bit of how I feel. Reality isn’t black and white, nobody is perfect, most people actually are far from it. But still, I miss my Dad.