Those are the words of Frank Gilroy, the American playwright and screenwriter whose play The Subject Was Roses won both the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1965. His career spanned more than six decades across plays, television, film, novels, and memoir, beginning in the Golden Age of Television and continuing through his final book, Writing for Love And/Or Money, published in 2007. He was one of those writers who never stopped. Long after the awards had been won and the attention had moved elsewhere, Frank kept at it. So if anyone knew what they were talking about when it came to writing, it was Frank Gilroy.

In early 2006, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. mounted a production of The Subject Was Roses. It starred Bill Pullman and Judith Ivey as John and Nettie Cleary, alongside an unknown young actor playing Timmy Cleary, a character loosely based on Gilroy himself. The play, a family drama set in the Bronx just after the Second World War, tells the story of a veteran who returns home from the war, only to find himself caught up in another one, this time between his parents. Timmy eventually realizes that he cannot fix the wounds of his family and that becoming his own man means leaving home all over again. Oh, and one small plot point: Timmy wants to be a writer.

Backstage, after one of the shows, Gilroy arrived with a stack of books in tow. Some were his own, others were books about the craft itself. He spoke to the cast and crew with exuberance about his love for the play and the current production, the thick clip of his Bronx accent making everything sound like an exclamation point, his eyes wide with excitement. But his focus seemed to be trained squarely on the young actor playing Timmy.

The books, it turned out, were a gift for him.

Frank called the young actor over and began going through the stack, showing him what he had brought. He talked about the books with the same enthusiasm he seemed to have for everything else in life, explaining why he had chosen them and how he felt they might be useful. The young actor stood listening, grateful for the attention but a little confused by it all. Then Frank took his hand, looked him directly in the eyes and said, “You’re a writer!”

“Did you know that?”

The young actor most certainly did not.

Frank explained that he had seen something in him, an essence. Something he had picked up from their conversations and from watching the young man inhabit Timmy had convinced him that there was a writer in there somewhere. This was, of course, news to the young man, who was just as certain that Gilroy was mistaken. He was an actor playing someone who wanted to be a writer, that much was true. He was not, nor had he ever actually been a writer. In fact, writing wasn’t even something he had ever really been interested in. The young man thanked Gilroy for his kind words, accepted the books, and then went back to the business of being an actor.

It’s a curious thing how and when the universe chooses to communicate. Equally curious is how and when someone is able to receive it. Frank had handed the young actor a sign that day, one he had apparently missed altogether. I’ve been wondering lately if I might be doing the same. I know, for me, I’m always a little slow on the uptake. Signs tend to pile up until I can no longer ignore them, and only then do I realize what they’ve been pointing to. I seem to be at the beginning of one of those moments now. The evidence gathering all around me. The pile getting harder to step over every day.

For some time now, I have been increasingly uncertain about where my career as an actor stands. Don’t get me wrong. I still love it. Deeply. This is not one of those retirement letters that actors drop when they think people have probably already forgotten about them. Trust me, if I ever do decide to retire from acting, you won’t hear about it in a social media post or a personal essay. I will simply one day cease being an actor and that will be that. A footnote in the history of the craft.

No, this is something different. A quiet shift? A grand awakening? I’m not really sure. All I know for certain is that, of late, I have begun to feel a restlessness that is as yet undefined. It started with small, almost imperceptible moments. Where once phone calls from agents brought the excitement of possibility, now they brought questions. Where was I going to have to go? For how long? How much sacrifice would I have to make now to do this thing that I loved so much? Once, a four-month shoot in Prague meant, Holy shit! I get to be a series regular and live in Prague? Sign me up! Now it means, Four months? What about Jen? What about my kids? How much am I going to miss?

Recently, the shifts have become louder and harder to ignore. I had an opportunity come my way that lit me up in a way that nothing had in a very long time. The Olivier Award-winning musical The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was transferring to the Public Theater in New York, and they were looking for their Benjamin. I hadn’t been on a NYC stage in over a decade and, now, finally, here was the thing that was worth coming back for. The thing that was worth the cost. I got to work learning the music, perfecting the Cornwall accent, and planning for what relocating my life to NYC would look like. Sure, I was going to miss out on a lot. Eight shows a week would leave little to no time for flying home. With Jen busy with work of her own and our kids in school in Los Angeles, there would be few opportunities for them to come see me. It was worth it though, right? It had to be. I loved the material, the character, the story, the way it was being told. I wanted to be a part of that. It made me want to get back in a rehearsal room, to spend my days pulling something apart and my nights putting it back together in front of an audience. The role was going to give me the chance to get back to something that I had been missing for so long, the chance to be the lead of an incredible piece of theatre again. In my mind, I was already prepared for its inevitable transfer to Broadway and everything that comes along with that.

Of course, I would have to fly myself to NYC to be seen for it. The Public, being a nonprofit, couldn’t cover the expense. Then there was a hotel for the week, a tune-up vocal lesson, the hours of preparation, and all of the things big and small that come with an audition like this. By the time I actually stepped in the room with the creative team, I was already about five thousand dollars in the hole.

But still, it was all worth it, right?

Being back in New York was also a cost that I hadn’t quite accounted for. I had lived there for over ten years. I knew this place. The noise. The subway. The shortcuts. I remembered the particular way you move through a crowd without ever really looking at anyone. My body still seemed to know its way around even if the rest of me wasn’t so sure anymore. And yet, walking those familiar streets, I felt strangely disconnected from the world I used to know so well. Like a ghost wandering the halls of a place it used to call home. I hadn’t forgotten New York, but I wasn’t certain she remembered me.

The afternoon of my audition, I left my midtown hotel and started walking towards Times Square station to catch the subway downtown. I cut across 45th Street, most likely out of habit, without consciously thinking about my path until I looked up and there it was.

The Jacobs Theatre.

I had spent the better part of a year inside of that building performing in the musical Once. It was the place where my whole life had changed in ways I could never have imagined when I first walked through its stage door. The place where I had experienced the greatest professional success of my life. It was also the place where I had experienced some of my lowest lows.

I stopped for a moment to take it all in.

Standing outside a place where a former version of yourself still seems to exist can be quite the mind fuck. If I really tried, I could almost hear him faintly playing music just on the other side of the wall. The young man who had wanted all of this so desperately. Who had spent years wondering if he would ever get the chance to prove himself, only to suddenly find himself standing in the middle of everything he had once imagined success might look like.

For the first time, and in a very real way, I could feel the distance between us.

Eventually, I started walking again. I left the Jacobs behind and continued downtown toward this new opportunity. This chance to find myself again. The show must go on! Once I arrived at the studio, whatever complicated feelings had followed me downtown disappeared the moment I began the audition. That part, at least, still felt like home.

The audition went well. Well enough that they asked me to come back a few days later to spend a little more time with the creative team. What had begun as an expensive gamble was starting to feel more and more like a sure thing. I mean, who wouldn’t want a Tony Award and Grammy Award winner to lead their musical, right? I left that second day of auditions feeling like I had done my job and began preparing myself for the call telling me that the role was mine. I could already see the Playbill headline.

Tony Winner Steve Kazee to Lead Benjamin Button Musical at the Public This Fall.

I headed back to my hotel to pack for my flight the following morning feeling like, in spite of all the signs to the contrary, this had all been worth it.

Right?

I was in the air, almost directly over my hometown, when a text came through from my agent.

It wasn’t going my way.

I was sure it was a mistake. Maybe I wasn’t reading it right? It took a few more deliberate reads to see that, in fact, the message was correct. I had done an amazing job. Everyone loved me. The creative team had simply sparked to another actor. And that was it.

My heart dropped thirty-six thousand feet and slammed straight into the rolling hills of Appalachia that I had clawed my way out of so many years ago. I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. I wanted to run. But I was trapped in a metal tube flying back to Los Angeles where I would soon arrive a failure, a fraud, and a fool.

For a few days after I got home, things were pretty bleak. I was devastated. I had given it everything I had and I was left with nothing to show for it. Mostly, I stayed upstairs lying in bed feeling sorry for myself. Sad. Angry. Embarrassed. I replayed the audition in my head over and over again, desperately searching for the moment when I had lost it. Could I have sung something differently? Made a different choice? Maybe I had misread the room entirely. The five thousand dollars was gone. The fantasy of my triumphant New York return had faded. The imagined Playbill headline had been replaced by the decidedly less triumphant reality of me lying alone in a bedroom in Los Angeles, licking my wounds.

Eventually, though, I had to go downstairs. One of the inconveniently convenient things about having kids is that they remain largely unimpressed by your professional and personal disappointments. There were dinners to make and baths to give. Stories to read and bedtimes to negotiate. There was a whole household operating below me, and it wasn’t fair to leave all of it to Jen simply because a small group of people three thousand miles away had decided they wanted someone else. So I picked myself up, or whatever was left of myself, and reenlisted in my life.

It was somewhere in the middle of all that ordinary life that I started to wonder why this particular rejection had hurt so fucking much.

For almost thirty years, this has been my life. Rejection is hardly new territory for me. I’ve lost way more jobs than I’ve ever won. Every actor has, and the ones that stick it out learn over time how to absorb it. You tell yourself that it was never really yours to begin with. They wanted someone taller. They’re going younger. They need someone older. Maybe someone funnier. More famous. Less famous. Someone who looks better standing next to whoever they had already cast. In this business, you develop whatever scar tissue you need to keep going. Most of the time, mine had done its job.

But this felt different.

I hadn’t just wanted Benjamin Button. I needed something from it.

That fact was way harder to admit to myself.

Somehow I had turned the part into evidence. Evidence that I could still do it. That I could still be the leading man of a musical. That Broadway was still there waiting to wrap me up in its arms if I ever decided to come home. That the young man I had almost heard singing through the walls of the Jacobs Theatre wasn’t gone. Maybe more than evidence, what I wanted was proof that I was still him.

And there it was. Another sign landing with a heavy thud on an already massive pile.

None of this meant I loved acting any less. I didn’t. The moment I walked into that audition room, all of the noise went quiet. I love the work. Disappearing into the material. Digging around until I find my way into another human being’s skin for two hours, eight times a week. That much was not in doubt. That still felt like home. What had started to feel less and less like home was everything surrounding it. The chasing. The waiting. The need to feel chosen. The idea that the next job might somehow confirm something about me that the last thirty years hadn’t already confirmed.

Most of my life, when someone asked me what I did, I would say “I’m an actor.” Not, “I act.” There is a big difference between the two. One describes something I do, while the other had become something I believed I was. I guess when you are young you need that kind of certainty. I know I did. I had spent years training for this. Suffered through the lean years when getting rent paid was perilous. All the no’s. All the disappointment. I had built my whole life around the possibility that someday someone might say yes. When they finally did, that identity hardened around me. I was an actor. It became the frame through which I viewed everything else in my life. How I understood myself. Looking back now, it’s clear I didn’t understand anything at all.

Which brings me back to that young man backstage at the Kennedy Center, holding a stack of books, being told he was a writer. He didn’t understand either. He didn’t see what Frank Gilroy was seeing in him. How could he? He already knew what he was. He was an actor.

I know because that young man was me.

I remember taking the books from him and thinking it was an incredibly kind gesture. I also remember thinking this nice man must be completely out of his mind. Me? A writer? Thank you, sir, but no thank you. I am an actor. I had just finished the three-year Graduate Acting program at the prestigious NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and for me, that alone was enough evidence to the contrary.

During my first year at NYU, Zelda Fichandler, the chair of the program at that time, taught a class whose final assignment was a thirty-minute psychobiography called the Universe Project. The instructions were simple. Find a piece of art as inspiration and then, using whatever theatrical means we wanted, explore the memories, objects, images, and associations that had somehow made us who we were. The subject in this case was not roses. The subject was you. Your universe. Not surprisingly, I struggled with this exercise. At that age, I wasn’t ready to be fully honest about where I had come from and how difficult that experience had been for me. Still, I committed myself to the project. After looking through so many art books that I lost count, I happened across this painting.

I didn’t know exactly why I was struck by this painting. I only knew that when I saw it, I felt it in my bones. There was something about this boy, one leg up, his foot on the frame’s edge, pulling himself out of the world that had been painted around him, that felt familiar to me. His eyes are wide, fixed on something outside the frame, something we can’t see yet.

At the time I would have told you that the painting represented escape. A kid trying to save himself from the darkness behind him. Given what I had come from, that interpretation wasn’t exactly difficult to arrive at. But looking at this painting now, almost twenty-five years later, I see something different. Something simpler. I see a boy climbing out of a frame. Just that. He isn’t destroying what’s behind him or running away from it. He is simply moving beyond it.

And here is where things get a little strange. While researching this piece, I found an interview with Frank conducted by fellow writer Doug Wright. A conversation between two Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights. Doug had travelled to Frank’s upstate New York home to learn more about how Frank worked. In an early scene, Doug asks to see the room where Frank has done his writing for the last fifty years. A modest upstairs room filled with boxes, binders, and bins containing decades of Frank’s writing. In the middle of the room sits what looks like an old folding card table, its faux wood vinyl covering worn and tattered at the edges. In the center of the table sit a basic Staples notepad and his cherished Royal typewriter. On the walls around the room, Frank has written down ideas as they came to him.

Cause and effect toujours. The vital ingredient from tragedy to farce.

Don’t mistake incidents for essence.

And finally.

First the picture, then the frame.

Frank died on September 12, 2015, just shy of what would have been his 90th birthday. I have no idea if Frank was familiar with the painting Escaping Criticism. I will never know if those words had anything to do with the image of the boy climbing out of a frame that I had inexplicably chosen years before we met. Probably not. But here I am, all these years later, looking at the two of them together and wondering how I missed something that now seems so obvious.

First the picture. Then the frame.

I had done it backwards. I had built the frame first. I was an actor. Then I spent three decades trying to make that picture of my life fit inside it. And for a long time, it did.

But the picture got bigger.

I got older. I fell in love. I became a father. The things I wanted changed. The things I was willing to sacrifice also changed. People I loved died. Things that I once believed would make me whole failed spectacularly at the assignment. Other things I never knew I wanted became impossible to imagine living without.

And the picture got bigger and bigger.

Then, one day, much to my surprise, the picture included me sitting down to write some ideas for a book that I had been thinking about. At first, it didn’t seem particularly significant. Certainly not significant enough to threaten anything. So I kept going. I wrote a little more. Then a little more. I found myself thinking about it when I wasn’t doing it. Ideas started arriving faster than I could get them onto the page. I bought a notebook so that I could try and catch them before they vanished. For the first time in a very long time, I wasn’t waiting for the phone to ring. There was no wondering where the next thing was coming from. I wasn’t trying to get something. I was just making something. And I like the way that feels. Maybe that’s what’s been missing. The feeling of being pulled toward something instead of the feeling of having to drag myself to it.

I don’t know where writing takes me from here. I don’t know where acting goes either. That kind of uncertainty would have sent an earlier version of myself scrambling to make sense of the situation. To have all the answers. To build the frame. Lately, I’m less interested in answers and more interested in the questions. The unknowns. Perhaps that’s what Frank meant about pictures and frames. You don’t have to know what something is going to become before you begin making it. You just begin.

Maybe that’s the thing about how the universe communicates. There are times when it isn’t subtle at all. Sometimes it puts a painting right in front of you. Other times it sends a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright to your theater carrying a stack of books for you. And even after all of that, you still need twenty years before you’re ready to hear what it’s been trying to tell you.

So what the hell am I doing here? I don’t entirely know, and for once, I think I'm okay with that.

Look at me, Frank. I’m writing.

Thanks for seeing me before I saw myself.

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I had started writing my first book, Thanks for Dying, in late July. I had been kicking the idea around in my head for quite some time but had finally sat down and set about the task of getting my ideas out of my head and onto the page. The book wasn’t supposed to be about him. At least not primarily. In fact, I had made a pretty conscious effort not to make him a focus. I didn’t want to do any more damage to him while he was alive by highlighting his failures and dragging him through the mud. The book, as I saw it in my head, was supposed to be about my mother, who died of breast cancer at fifty-nine, and about the strange thing that happened in the years after I lost her.

I had become grateful that she died.

Even writing that sentence feels strange. Obviously I wasn’t grateful that she got cancer. I wasn’t grateful for the pain she felt as that cancer metastasized to her bones, and then to her liver. I wasn’t grateful for what it stole from us. I wasn’t grateful for the phone call, the final days of wasting away, or the years that I would never get to have with her.

No, not even close.

I would give almost anything to have her back tomorrow. But as I sit here today I am beyond grateful for what her death eventually began to teach me about being alive.

My mother and I were incredibly close. Some of that was simply who we were, the love that we shared, but some of it was forged in the particular way people become close when they have been through the trenches together. My father’s alcoholism and drug use were a disease that the entire family lived with, and my mom and I learned, in our own ways, how to survive inside of it. We knew how quickly the weather in the house could change. Silently counting the hours together watching Night Tracks, a music video show, as we awaited his inevitable return from the bar. Prince singing “Purple Rain” was a hell of a salve for the anxiety of anticipating a slamming car door and drunken footsteps tromping through gravel. We could hear the muffled grumbling and swearing as he got closer and closer to the front door. The TV would get shut off, any lights we had on would be turned off, and my mom would send me off to bed before my dad had a chance to see that I was still up. Once I got to my tiny room with the wood-paneled walls, I would lie under the covers and listen as the world outside started to come apart at the seams. Inside of a blue and white single-wide trailer in Ashland, Kentucky, we learned when to be quiet and how to be still. We could sense when it was time to disappear, when it was time to run, and when it was safe to laugh again. All to the soundtrack of the greatest hits of the 80s.

For most of my life I considered our bond to be one of the few good things that came out of those years of my life. I still do. But I’ve also come to understand that there was something unhealthy in all of it. A child shouldn’t have to feel responsible for his mother’s survival any more than a mother should have to look to her child for safety. We were fighting a war neither of us had started, but somewhere in the fog of that war the borders had blurred and the line between parent and child, protector and protected, became harder and harder to make sense of. All of this became much clearer for me when I had my own kids and I was able to see it all through their eyes. A therapist once told me that I would never fully understand the weight of the things that had happened to me as a child until I had my own children and I had to see how little I really was at the time.

She was right and it was absolutely devastating.

Of course, I don’t say any of this to diminish what we had. If anything, it makes me feel more love and compassion for my mom and for the little version of me. We were only trying to survive. But survival has a way of creating its own habits, and sometimes you carry those habits with you long after the war is over. My mother was my everything and when she died I didn’t just lose her. I lost the only other person who could ever remember what we went through together. Who could ever say “I know.”

One big thing that my mom’s death taught me was that nothing stays. Not our parents, not our children as we know them today, not our careers, our bodies, our friendships, ambitions, or grudges. Not us. Everything we love or loathe is already leaving.

That feels bleak on the page but it doesn’t feel bleak to me anymore. It feels instead like an invitation. An opening to explore.

So here I am sitting at my table in front of a laptop screen trying to make sense out of the irony of my situation. There are way better writers than me who would know what to do with symbolism this obvious. Of course he died like this. At this moment. Obviously this man who complicated so much of my life would, with his own death, find a way to complicate a book about my mother's death too.

This was all very on the nose for my dad.

I knew my relationship with my father wasn’t safe long before I knew what safety even was. He was an alcoholic. He could be violent, not just physically, but emotionally to both my mother and me. Though I suspect my mother suffered more than I even know. He was punishing. He was mean. His rage was palpable.

But he was also a contradiction.

When he wasn’t drinking or using, which wasn’t often, he was funny, charming, a good friend, and a helping hand for anyone who needed it. I have said before about my father that if you needed twenty dollars and he only had ten he would borrow the rest just so he could help. That always fucked with me. How could this man, someone who seemed, at least superficially, to care about so many people, be the same man who couldn’t see that the two people who needed him most were right in front of him? Why couldn’t he meet our needs the way he seemed to long to meet everyone else’s? His anger, pain, and, most of all, his shame were always directed squarely at my mother and me.

I was so afraid of him. And for much of my life, I carried that fear into places that it didn’t need to go. It accompanied me into rooms that had no knowledge of my father or the pain he had inflicted. It followed me around, skewing not only my view of the world but also the world's view of me. Which reminds me. If you are reading this and thinking to yourself, “Oh, now I get it,” I apologize. I didn’t fully begin to understand until very recently and with the help of heavy doses of psychedelic therapy just what had made the monster that made me.

Through those harrowing hours of psychedelic sessions, I began to see that my dad was the victim of a childhood that made mine look almost whimsical. Trust me when I say that if you really knew the deep darkness of mine you would understand too. His parents were both alcoholics, drug users, abusers, and wholly unqualified for their roles. So were their parents and their parents’ parents before them.

Generational trauma is like that. Coursing through the veins of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, until finally it either consumes the bloodline or someone finds a way to stop the bleeding. I like to think it ends with me but stopping the bleeding isn’t the same thing as healing the wound. I get to choose what gets passed on but I don’t get to pretend that I wasn’t shaped by what was passed down to me. That’s the strange thing about childhood. Eventually you grow up, but the things that happened to you also grow up with you. Sometimes they even become quite useful.

I was afraid but fear can make you resilient. It can teach you how to read a room long before anyone else realizes the room needs reading. It can keep you safe or make you funny, charming, ambitious. Fear can teach you to survive. But survival can be a stubborn thing. The things we learn to do because we have to can stay with us far longer than they are needed. And sometimes the thing that saved you becomes the thing you need saving from.

When I was young I had hoped, perhaps naively, that there might eventually be some kind of reckoning between my father and me. I certainly wasn’t sitting around waiting for the phone to ring but I was hopeful. Eventually, I stopped believing that my dad was suddenly going to transform into the father I needed when I was a little boy. I grew up. I graduated high school and college. I went out into the world and I built an incredible life for myself. I was successful. I met a wonderful woman and had children of my own. Along the way, I kept thinking that surely, one day, he would see this and be proud of me. Proud of all that I had accomplished. That seeing his grandchildren would have the same effect on him that having them had on me. It made me want to strive every day to be a better version of myself. Maybe, just maybe, he would look at his own life the way I was looking at mine and he would see how much he had hurt me. And he would say “I’m sorry.”

Such a simple phrase.

That, of course, never happened.

But apparently some small part of me had kept a light on, because as long as he was alive, there was still technically time. I never gave up on him. There were times that I came very close to giving up on him completely, and the truth is that he would have deserved it. I flew him out to Los Angeles in the spring of 2022 to meet my son, Callum, who was turning two. I wanted to give him the chance to make up for the time he had squandered with me. What I saw instead was the depth of my father’s trauma in his inability to be vulnerable with my son. He was almost childlike in the way he interacted with him. Scared to be loving. Nervous to do the wrong thing. I could see that he loved him but he had no concept of how to show it. Towards the end of that trip, we sat together in my kitchen and I told him about my experiences with psychedelics and how they had shown me all the ways he had suffered as a child. I explained to him that while I could never forget the things he had put my mother and me through, I did understand a little better why he was suffering so much in his life. He didn’t really say much back, couldn’t say much. He just didn’t have the tools. He never learned how. He was never taught.

At the end of that trip, I dropped him off at the airport and I watched from a distance as he made his way through the TSA line. He looked so old to me. So small. So lost inside of the world. Instinctively, I pulled out my phone to take a picture. Something inside was telling me that this would be the last time I saw him and I wanted to remember it. For what, I don’t know. Maybe because I was realizing in that moment that he had no power left over me. How could he? This feeble old man who was decades past being the terrifying tormentor he had been for so long. As it turned out, my instinct was right and that was the last time I saw my father.

Some months later, he had asked me for help posting a video of my son onto his Facebook. My father, like so many of his generation, was barely literate when it came to social media. He gave me his login information and I proceeded to upload the smiling video of Callum saying Happy Birthday to him. Logging into his Facebook had also logged me into his Messenger app.

A message popped up.

It was a conversation between him and a woman whose name I didn’t recognize.

And that is how I found out that, at the age of sixty-nine, my father was using meth. I wish I could say I was surprised. But I grew up in the foothills of Appalachia, a place that had already been hollowed out by the opioid crisis of the early 2000s. When the pills became harder to get, cheap heroin and meth were happy to move in and fill the void. My father, apparently, had moved right along with them.

This was a red line for me. I confronted him about using and he, of course, denied it. When I read him the exchanges word for word, he mostly blamed me for invading his privacy. I was done, though. I don’t know why meth was my breaking point when all the years of alcohol and other narcotics had not been but it was. I would never again let him be around my family. There is a saying that I live by now: “Don’t let the family you come from fuck up the family that comes from you.”

Nearly a year later, my partner and I found out that we were going to be parents again. This time to a baby girl. I was so excited at the prospect of seeing some part of my mom reborn in her and I was not disappointed. She came out with a twinkle in her eye that reminds me of my mom every day. I held strong to my new creed. I had lost all faith that I could trust my dad to tell the truth about his using and I stood firm in my resistance to him bringing any part of that life around my own. Time passed and before long she was walking and talking. I offered to bring him out to meet her on the condition of him taking a drug test. He lost it. He couldn’t believe that I wasn’t taking his word that he was clean. It was a show. A pathetic attempt at redirection from a clearly guilty man. I refused to give in. He refused to comply. And so, my dad never met my daughter Rhiannon.

I’m so sorry for him that he didn’t.

There was no final conversation for my dad and me. No revelation or reconciliation. No apology. No moment where he suddenly became the man I so desperately needed him to be. He simply stopped existing and the story was over.

In the days after, people said the obvious things. I’m sorry for your loss and the many variations of the theme. I knew what they meant. The meaning of the loss I was less sure of.

When my mother died, I understood immediately what had been taken from me. Her. I wanted more of her. More hours-long phone calls, more of her cackling laughter, more of her smiles. More ordinary days where nothing important happened. I wanted her to know my family. My children. I wanted my children to know her. I wanted time.

With my father, the grief has been harder to locate. Was I even grieving him or the father I never really had? Was it the possibility that something between us could still change, or the little boy who had once believed it would? I still don’t know. I don’t know if I forgive him or if forgiving him is even the right question. How do I feel when I think about the fact that there is now a world in which my father no longer exists? Sometimes there is sadness. At times there is anger. There’s certainly some relief. I reach deep to find compassion. Then there is nothing, just numbness, followed almost immediately by guilt about the fact that I could feel nothing. Death doesn’t always create the absence. Sometimes it just makes the absence permanent.

Maybe the people who hurt us leave things behind too. Maybe we grieve them. Maybe we grieve ourselves. Maybe we grieve the life that might have existed if they had been different. Or maybe, just maybe, we stand in front of a closed door for a while, remembering all those years that we had hoped someone would walk through it.

I’m not sure yet. When something you’ve spent your whole life pushing so hard against suddenly disappears, you can be relieved by its absence and still lose your balance.

Which, I suppose, is why I’m writing.

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