Zenfull Heart | October 7, 2026
Today, October 7, 2026
That feels almost impossible to me. I was only 16 when he died, and he was 69. I have now lived 24 years without him. I remember reaching that strange point when he had been gone for longer than I had ever known him. And suddenly I had officially lived longer without my dad than I had ever lived with him.
When my brothers came to tell me that my dad had died, I could not even cry. I felt like I had to be the strong one. Looking back now, I am still not sure how much of everything surrounding my dad I ever fully processed, understood, or released.
My childhood with him was anything but stable. My dad suffered from severe PTSD and had many mental and physical health problems. He was an on-and-off raging alcoholic, smoked cigarettes, and was severely unstable for much of my childhood. We moved from place to place almost every year, and I was handed off to different people throughout different parts of my childhood. There was very little consistency or sense of safety.
I also spent much of my childhood taking care of him in whatever ways a child could. I did the best I knew how to do at the time, even though a child should never have had to carry some of the things I carried. But that is not the entire story.
He did try to spend time with me. He took me fishing and on car rides. When I was in fifth grade, he started buying me the Mr. and Mrs. teddy bears from Walmart for Christmas, and he would also buy me a Valentine's Day teddy bear. I only have three of them left now, and I wish I still had the others because they mean something different to me today than they did when I was younger.
He also gave me Fayfull, my dog, sometime during the summer between fifth and sixth grade. She became an absolute blessing in my life and stayed with me for 15 years, through middle school, high school, college, and into adulthood. In a childhood that often felt unstable, she became one of the most consistent forms of love and companionship I had.
I wish I had more good memories of my dad than I do, but I still loved him then, and I still love him now.
At 40, I can understand things about him that I never could have understood at 16. He was operating from his own broken system. He was carrying trauma, dysfunction, addiction, pain, and whatever had been handed down to him long before I was born.
Understanding that does not erase what being his daughter was like. It does not change the instability or the ways that instability shaped me. It simply allows me to see him as a human being who was deeply wounded himself. Those patterns absolutely followed me into adulthood.
The little girl who learned to take care of an unstable parent became a young woman who entered an unstable intimate relationship. The chaos, the neglect, the emotional, verbal, and physical abuse, and the domestic violence roller coaster I tolerated as an adult did not appear out of nowhere. I had already learned very early that love and pain could exist in the same place. I had learned how to stay, how to take care of someone else, and how to survive instability. At 16, I had no understanding of any of that. I just knew my dad was gone and somehow I needed to keep going.
Now, 24 years later, I sometimes wonder whether I ever fully grieved him. There was the grief of losing my dad physically, but there was also grief for the father I never really got to have. The healthy and stable father. The father who could have made a little girl feel protected instead of teaching her so early how to survive.
I do not know if grief like that ever becomes completely finished. Maybe it changes as we change. Maybe we understand different pieces of it when we finally have enough distance and awareness to look back and see what was really happening.
24 years later, I can love my dad without rewriting my childhood. I can have compassion for the broken system he came from without pretending that his brokenness did not affect mine. I can be grateful for what he did give me while still grieving what he could not.
Maybe that is where I am with him today. Not trying to make the story better or worse than it was, but finally able to see more of it clearly.
