My dad passed away at the beginning of May.

I haven’t written too much about it, because it’s been difficult to really sort out how I feel about it. I wish it wasn’t as complicated as it is. The tl;dr version is, for a few months before he passed, there were a lot of issues he was regularly in the hospital for. For weeks, it seemed like things were constantly on the verge of catastrophe, and there was a really good chance things would end really badly. But the doctors at John Muir, and the hospice care folks did a wonderful job, and he was at home and passed peacefully with my mom and I by his side.

I write this on the first Father’s Day of my life without him. It doesn’t feel that different. For the last handful of years, his memory had been going, and realistically, it’s been years since he’s been able to have a conversation longer than a few minutes that he could retain. The last few years were the same questions, over and over. “What are you doing for work?” “How old are the kids?” that kind of thing. My last coherent interaction with him was when they had to insert a tube into his gut through his nose, and he lashed out at me, because I was the nearest available target. It was as though this voice of my grandmother spoke directly through him.

It sucks that that’s the last thing he ever said to me. I’m glad that that *voice* – the one of careless bitterness and thoughtless anger – is gone. It passed down from my grandmother to my aunt, and to him. But not through me to my kids. It’s not “who he was” the vast majority of his life. He was mostly a pretty calm, stoic guy. Dryly funny. Everywhere he went he was used to being the smartest guy in the room. One of the most important lessons I learned from him is that I never want to be the smartest guy in the room, and even if I think I am, my life is better served believing I’m not. I compliment the kids on a lot of things. I do my best to make it about the effort and the care and the kindness they put into the world, and not about “smart”.

My memories of doing things with him are relatively sparse. Most of my childhood, he’d work every day during the week, and if I was lucky, he’d be home in time to say good night. I played catch with him at the Wildwood playground when I was a kid. He bought a Tamiya Grasshopper, and we put it together together. He consoled me when I was upset about an unrequited crush. He tried his best to help me navigate through conflict with my mom. He helped me with a science project in high school.

He was also explicitly disappointed that I was more of an engineer than a scientist. Never really understood the person I grew into, or the skills I developed that shaped my career. I think both my parents still think of me as someone who’s “too sensitive” and not “tough” enough to be as capable as they’d hoped I might be. They’re wrong, but it’s still disappointing that they never really “see” me, and they’ll never know that I’m much better at things than they expect.

He had an impact on a lot of folks. Worked with a consistent crew of friends in the last decades of his life that think very highly of him as both an intelligent guy and a passionate leader. I’m grateful for that. I worked for him for a few years, and I found it a challenging experience, but that’s probably the case with any child working for their parent.

I dunno. This is pretty rambling. But I think that’s … the relationship. It wasn’t clearly good or bad. The last few years were pretty rough, and we had a fight when J was a baby that our relationship never actually recovered from. There was a period I was pretty sure I’d never talk to him again, and because the thing that really changed that was a life-smashing accident that was out of my control, and leaving him to his own devices in that circumstance would have been morally reprehensible to me, a lot of our interaction over the last decade wasn’t really something I chose, it was something that was more thrust upon me. That sounds shitty. It feels shitty. It was a shitty 10 years.

I’m glad he was able to get to know his grandkids, and I’m glad they don’t think of him the way I do sometimes. For the most part, I don’t really understand what he is to them – for the bulk of their memory, he was … mostly kind of an inert presence. Part of the “grandparents”, but his memory had gone by the time they could really develop some sort of two-way relationship with him. I know they’re sad he’s gone, and I’m glad for that.

This is a pretty terrible Father’s Day/memorial post. I get it. I wish I could just say all the good things, and paint him in this glowing light that somehow accurately reflected my feelings. He had an absolutely miserable last decade that he did absolutely nothing to deserve. I wish things had been different for him. I wish he’d been able to keep working – which he loved doing, or that he’d been able to travel, which he was *supposed* to do with my mother. I wish he hadn’t blown every penny he’d had on his failed company. I wish he hadn’t lied to my mom about their finances. I wish he hadn’t tried to manipulate me into buying his worthless house he was underwater on, and just been upfront and honest about the situation he was in.

But that’s not the situation. That’s not the relationship.

I’m glad he was a mitigating force in the toxic relationship between me and my mom when I was a teenager. I wish he’d been better at that relationship himself as an adult. I dunno. I feel like everything I write is “this, but that,” and it sucks. I wish I could say I unconditionally loved him, and how grateful I was that he was my dad. There’s some small part of me for which that is true. But that’s not the thing. It’s complicated.

It’ll always be complicated.

I hope at least, that he’s at rest, and at peace. And that his suffering is over.