Today's is the Father's Day I'm experiencing without my Dad. More than ever, I realize just how lucky I was to have the father I did. We were so different-he was more athletic, I was more academic-but he always encouraged me to follow my goals, and always comforted me when I felt depression or despair.

People have called me everything from thoughtful to compassionate, and if I am Dad played a huge role in making me that way. So much of him lives on in me, and even if he's gone his memory's always with me.

Thinking of that makes me smile as I type this.

   

Condolences for your loss. I do feel genuine envy though for anyone who had a good relationship with their father. Too many of the rest of us got either the indifferent one. Or the absent one. Or, even worse, the one where we got suppressed to the point that for most of our we have intense difficulty functioning as adults because the old man was so bullying and domineering and outright embarrassing far too often. When your dad's real gift to you is lifelong PTSD and depression you tend to have a very different outlook on things.

I had the latter sort of father. I accepted a long time ago that I would have been better off fatherless, because my mom was a truly great person. He caused a lot of damage to all of us with his relentless controlling and far-too-frequent rages. I can't be around anyone who gets angry at work or when I was in school. I have massive panic attacks to the point of nearly passing out when it happens because that kind of behaviour was what happened at home. Let's just say that any Father's Day cards I gave to him were pretty much just for show and the sentiment just wasn't there. He'd pretty much killed those positive emotions entirely in me by the time I got to high school.

   

I don't remember exactly at what age but I was pretty young when I started telling my mom to dump my dad... but she never did. Pretty sure she would have been a much happier person if she'd left him. After he died, she admitted that he'd told her that he'd kill himself if she did. Didn't help that he was an alcoholic.

...and that's my story.

   

Sorry for your loss Jared. He seemed nice.