purging

it's so hard to figure out what to keep and what to sweep away. photos and documents that mean nothing now may be important to me later, or even important to future generations.

i'm cleaning out my dad's personal effects, he died just about 40 days ago, on my birthday.

hyperventilating at times, tears falling. a life gone from this earth, but still here in so many ways. it feels like the ultimate push-off, deciding what part of him remains in our care and what goes to the landfill.

this is the last time i'll be in this place and it feels sad and exhausting. i want to take it all in and burn it into my synapses, but it's overwhelming and i'm scared that the wrong things will be etched forever.

there was a time, for about a year and a half, when we didn't speak ... it was my choice. i'm not sure now what it was that pushed me over the edge; i think it might've been him paying someone $50 to shoot my dog. it was the culmination of years of verbal abuse and continually-crashed boundaries, i remember that much. it also might've had something to do with when i heard (years after the fact, mind you) that he had held a gun to my mother's head.

i'm seeing those letters now, the ones i wrote to him to explain what a bastard he had been ... i can't bring myself to read them. i'm torn between going outside to burn them right now and saving them to perhaps gain some insight later, when i can work up the guts to look them over.

fifteen years ago, he made a dramatic change. he was no longer a prick, but he still drove me crazy. so much easier to get along with, we repaired our relationship ... well, as much as we could without him really acknowledging the things he had done (though he did say in a letter once that he "had been a putz"). at the end, i'd say we were pretty good friends, and i know we loved each other a great deal. we talked often, several times a week. he still treated me like a child, but i think that's what dads do, especially ones that are trying to make up for decades of being an asshole.

now i just miss him.