Turners Falls

 

yes, haunting again today... haunting my memories of my own life as often as I can

 

Got a call from my daughter yesterday afternoon, a very rare event. She asked me if I were sitting down, so I knew she was going to tell me someone had died, but I never expected it to be the person it was.

 

It was her father, whom she never knew because he didn't want to know her. He committed suicide in August. He was able to do what I haven't been able to do. I envy him that he could end his own misery, whatever that was, and I haven't been able to end mine. My daughter wanted me to tell her why he killed himself, and all I could say was I don't know. When I knew him thirty years ago, he wasn't depressed. Or he hid it very well.

 

For all these 30 years I've hoped he would mature enough one day to want to at least meet her. I've hoped he'd married and had other children, so that my daughter wouldn't be an only child. I never met the man who could be my husband, and so I never could give my kid a sibling, and I wanted badly for her to have one. I've hoped his parents and sisters would stop being intimidated by him and get to know my daughter themselves. They never did. And he never had anymore children. We also found out yesterday that both of his parents are dead -- one last year and one this year -- and they also died without ever wanting to see her even once. All the hopes held quietly inside me and I think inside my daughter too, all over.

 

All over with him, her father, and with her grandparents. But there remain two sisters, two aunts of my daughter, with whom there might still be some hope. In fact, it was one of the sisters who told their family lawyer about my daughter's existence, otherwise he never would have known. In thirty years the parents had never once told their lawyer about my daughter.

 

This whole thing is bringing out lots of old wounds for both of us. It's shocking and it's complicated. We can't say we loved him -- we didn't. And at times we have hated him. But we didn't necessarily wish him dead before his time, and we didn't want the death of all those hopes we had concerning him and his parents. And he was, after all, my daughter's biological father, and she has his bone structure and his blood type and his selfishness, to tell truth. Though absent all those years, he was and always has to be a figure in our lives because he was the man who fathered her.

 

So, a loveless but nonetheless important remembrance:

 

 

I wait now, to see if my daughter will at the very least have her aunts, and her cousins.