Dear Dad,
Yesterday was your birthday. I didn't think much of it, or at least, I tried not to. Today, it's hitting me like a ton of bricks. You've been gone now for almost 3 years. It amazes me that I can even keep track of it since it's more like you been gone for like 30 years. That sucks a lot considering I am only 30. You left so suddenly I almost didn't go to the hospital to say goodbye. I didn't think my toddler should be involved in that type of hospital visit. After being torn for about an hour on the decision, I decide to go and you were gone before I got there. Strangers to me were there to say goodbye to you, but I was not.
Now, I am left to feel this pain alone for the rest of my life. How is that you can hate someone and love them at the same time? I don't understand it, but I know how it feels. You left me! You never gave me a chance to tell you how I felt about you, or lack of you my whole life. You met your only grand daughter a handful of times and never met your only grandson who was only 3 months old when you died. YOu are terrible. I can't believe you would choose to live the life you chose, instead of one with me. I would have been there for you if you had only wanted to live right.
I have so many things I wish I could say to you, that I will never be able to. I can scream them at the top of my lungs. I can write them. I could talk to the cold frozen ground where you are buried. But in all those options, you will never hear me. You will never know. How much I loved you. How much I love you still. And how much I HATE you. How angry I am at you. That you were never there for me. That at your funeral people claimed you as their father and though you really were mine, I couldn't. That my kids will never experience a grandfather from my side of the family. How much you hurt me. How much I hurt still.
I can't stop crying. My kids are looking at me like I'm crazy. I just want to scream. AHHHHHHHH! Only who cares, it doesn't help. My husband asked me when I would be ready to visit your grave and I tell him as I shrug my shoulders, probably never. Why you ask? Because it won't matter. It won't fix anything. It won't change anything. You still won't hear me. The pain won't stop. You will have still been an absent figure in my entire life thus far, even if I am not absent in your death. So what am I supposed to do?
Sit around crying? I can't. I have babies to take care of. So instead, I write. Supposedly to you. Letters that will never reach you. Words that you will never read. Feelings that you will never understand, know, feel... You left me. You were never even there for me, and you left me still. How unfair is that?
Unfair enough that it hurts as much as a dull dagger jabbed into my heart and twisted for extra agony. Thanks. For nothing really. Or for everything. Not having you has made me stronger. Or has it? You tell me. I mean, really, I'm writing letters to a dead guy....
