Fathers and Sons: I miss my Dad

Do you have a father? I did. He’s dead now.

That’s the least emotional manner in which I can admit this fact.

Fathers and Sons; a relationship as old as man, and as turbulent as anything else you can think of. It’s been years now, but it still hurts just as much, an empty space, an aching void where he should be. Gods do I miss the man I grew up hating and loving in equal measures. I can trace so many of my issues and my strengths directly to him.

I’m not sure what this post is about, as it was triggered by an overwhelming barrage of emotions that hit me as I’m trying to suss out how I ended up where I am in life now, metaphorically and literally kneeling in the wet grass sobbing and cursing the headstone on his grave.

Let’s start by acknowledging I am a mess of man.

We all like to think we are not that badly put together, truly as a species, man tends toward the rosy version of the truth when it comes to self-evaluation. I have five children by my current wife, one by another that I divorced due to relationship failures too numerous to come back from (and bad decision-making on my part at the outset, why did we get married?).