I think that no matter how dramatic we try to make our lives, reality always finds a way to steal the show. This has been true in my life, to the point of being painful and crushing. I recently was reawakened to my past pains, and yet they served as a sort of epiphany for me. I have decided to borrow Sterling’s proverbial soapbox for just a little while, because I have something to say.

As my friends know, I live only with my mother. My parents were divorced before I was old enough to understand. My visits with my father were infrequent, and of little real bearing on me, and increased in both capacities when mom and I moved to Georgia. Then, somewhere along the line, we lost contact. Dad just disappeared. I didn’t know where he was or how to contact him. It wasn’t terribly different from my life before, even with the scattered visits, still disturbing in all those small ways. I never had anyone to teach me about sports, cars, ties or any of the far more serious roles that are so important in the life of a father. Along with that, the single parent/only child household left me with a somewhat limited ability to explore new things, although my mother did everything for me and I appreciate it all.

I held neither bitterness nor rapture when my father finally called one day to tell us about the death of my grandmother, his foster mother. To explain a bit of his history, my father was born in Germany as the result of a rape. He was put up for adoption and came to America when he was 6 to be raised by the Faheys. His childhood left him somewhat ill-equipped to deal with love and thus he had a handful of marriages that garnered many children. Despite my being one of many, my mother still wished me to have some contact with my father. I’m now in her debt for putting us back together.

I started talking to Dad once a week on the phone. In our conversations, we’d tell each other about our lives. He was living out in New Mexico, working at a small gun shop. He was with his new wife, Christine, and he seemed truly happy with his life for once. I began visiting him once a year for a week at a time. The first year, I saw my father for the first time in several years and we were reintroduced into each others’ lives. It filled me with joy to see him finally find his place. I never harbored any resentment for living without him in my daily life. It had always been more of a longing, which had shifted now into understanding. Either way, I thought little about the emotional implications as I enjoyed my visits. Dad took me on road trips for days on end, taught me how to drive, shoot and, indirectly, how to influence people’s lives. In short, he made the effort to be a father and I couldn’t have been happier with our relationship.

In 1998, after visiting Dad over my 13th birthday, I went on a trip across the country with my uncle through an itinerary of amusement parks. As we were heading towards Pittsburgh, my aunt got a call on her cell. It was my mom calling from home. My excitement at the call faded as my aunt’s face dropped. Whatever my mom had said, it made her suddenly solemn. I immediately assumed our pet bird had died.

When we arrived at our hotel, I was put on the phone with my mom. I heard her in tears on the line and asked her what was wrong. It was then that she told me that Dad had died, suffering from an aortic aneurysm early that morning. I had known him for only a few years, but that had been enough time to finally reestablish a relationship, and now he was gone. I cried for hours that day and spent each night of the vacation lying awake in shock. I returned home at the end and held back most of my tears upon seeing my mom.
When we went to visit Christine a week after I got home from the vacation, I was greeted by the same world in which my father had found his peace, but without him in it. At each turn, I had one of his friends that I had met telling me how much Dad had meant to them. His coworker, a young man named Isaac, told me how he considered my dad as the father he never had. That was a brutal awakening, as this man had made the acknowledgement that I had every reason to make. With Isaac, I felt almost inferior in my grief, as if I had too small a claim, though his son, to be mournful. Finally, one night, as my mom and Christine swapped stories about living with my father, I climbed up onto the deck he had built on the back of his house and looked up at the stars, which were unfettered by clouds in the desert sky. There, standing on something that my father had built and standing as someone whom my father had loved, I wept honestly to myself, alone by choice. It was the culmination of the emotions welling inside me. To be plain, I just couldn’t hold the true tears back anymore. It was too much for a kid to take.

When I returned to my life, I went through some odd stages. Anyone who knew me in eighth grade could tell you I was using the horrible situation as a sort of conversation starter, perhaps for pity or some sense of gain in loss. I regret that now, as it seems almost disgraceful to so use my father’s death. I reacted in ways that seem foolish, but I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I had lost someone important to me and close to my heart. I also became mad at everything. I was mad at Dad because he never took care of himself. I was mad at God for taking Dad away when I had only begun to get to know him. Mostly, however, I became angry with myself.

You see, in all of those phone conversations and in all of the visits, I had never called my father Dad. I never said anything that acknowledged him as my father. I told him I loved him as standard end-of-call procedure and only truly thought about it a few times. Now he’s gone and I never got the chance to tell him how much I truly appreciated having him in my life and how honored I was and still am to be his son. Only rarely was I truly in touch with my pain. Though I worked through those times, some part of me still to this day regrets the things I left unsaid. I never told him how much I loved him and how happy I was to finally find him and make him a part of who I am. I regretted that he should not only be taken when he was finally happy, but perhaps without the knowledge that his son respected the bliss he had worked so hard for.

This past Friday, the 21st of March, was my father’s birthday. I spent the night with my friends, having actually forgotten the occasion until someone pointed out that the date was 03/21. Even after that, I shifted the thought to the back of my mind as I concerned myself with what I deemed more important. Then, Sunday night, I realized the disservice I had done, feeling that I had betrayed Dad once more through my apathy to his memory. I suddenly felt a torrent of emotions course through me and I wept powerfully, to the point that I lost thought towards all else. I confronted the regret and the missed chances. I felt the unbearable pain of words left unsaid and feelings left unexpressed. Through the pain, however, I suddenly felt an incredible driving initiative, created by the pain itself, and I turned to two people who constantly receive my trust, telling them, in the midst of my intense emotional tempest, what I intend to say to you now.

Most of my friends, and indeed most of the people my age that I come into contact with, don’t realize the chances they have. They look around them and just assume that their lives cannot change so drastically that they would have to prepare for it. I am amazingly still guilty of that same small fault myself. I call it a fault lightly, because it can, in fact, prove horribly dangerous, and in my case, I have no excuse of ignorance to cling to. To all those who often think that your parents are unbearable or that they will always be there, I wish to stand as witness. Though my regret isn’t a constant plaguing emotion, it still appears in moments of unbearable agony. Thus, I don’t want anyone to regret that they did not speak their hearts. I encourage everyone to go home, hug their parents and tell them how much they mean to you, or at the very least, to put aside any resentment and cherish them. You all have a chance that I don’t have anymore and therefore, it terrifies me to see such chances scoffed at. Today, how I wish I could hug my father, even if I had to wait until a week in the summer, for at least then I’d have the prospect. It’s so simple and yet so often overlooked. It doesn’t only apply to parents either. Don’t let a day go by wherein you don’t at the very least express some gratitude for the existence of people whom you love. For instance, right now I want all my friends to know how much I love them and cherish every moment with them. It’s incredibly easy to do so and yet it is equally simple to cast our feelings aside as constants, but such ambivalence is treacherous. I don’t want any of my friends to doubt my love for them, nor do I want anyone to experience this pain when I could be an example to them. My grief would be lessened by the knowledge that I had perhaps influenced one person towards making their feelings clear and unquestionable. So please, use the time you have. Don’t do it as an obligation, but seize it as an opportunity, for that’s what it is: a simple chance to make emotions known when they are felt, when they burn brightest, instead of acknowledging them only through mourning in the darkness, after they burn out unexpressed.

Today something incredibly bizarre happened. I was sitting in Euro, gloating over a surprising 100 on a recent test (for which I actually read the book….hmmmm), when a counselor’s wench brought in a manila envelope. I thought it might be for me, as the counselor’s office is never finished with me. Sure enough, Mrs. Crockett glanced at the sticky note and handed it to me. I pulled out the contents, the first of which was a letter from Ms. Issenberg:
“When I was looking through your permanent folder for information for STAR student, these papers were in there. It’s a miracle they were kept in there so long.”

I was puzzled, so I slipped out the first paper and found a worksheet adorned with the image of a snowman with a bunch of lines across his stomach. On these lines were written in a hasty, untrained hand an account of what one should do if it snows. I suddenly recognized the paper. It was an essay I had written in fourth grade. In my hands sent the eight-year-old contents of my mind. As I leafed through the pages, I found more samples of my writing. It was amazing to note the style I used in my fiction and essays. There were differences from my writing style these days, as would be expected. My grasp of themes only went as far as to write a last sentence that summed up the point, a moral statement that tied up ideas I had never really addressed in the first place. There was an essay about how revenge only hurts. Let’s just say I should have left that to Dumas. Some things were similar, however. I enjoyed addressing my audience and making things personal, in the same fashion that I do now. Haven’t you noticed that in my writing? Just kidding. I like to think that my imagery has improved and I write with a little more clarity and flow, but it’s interesting to see how decently I wrote even then. I mean, I was a 5th grader using the words “theory” and “crevice.” I find that pretty cool. Pretty cool indeed.