Without an Anchor- Day 135 (May 15th, 2021)

It's hard to look at pictures of my dad, because he belongs to me mostly as a source of pain and displacement. There is so little I know about him from when he was here and obviously I know nothing of how he would be today if he hadn't died. He is "what-if" personified. He is a ghost from my past who will always exist in a specific bubble of time. A time when things, though tumultuous and terrifying, still had him as a kind of anchor. He wasn't a good anchor. But he was an anchor nonetheless. He was a source of weight that, at the time, kept us from drifting. Even through the cancer, the remissions, his and mom's terrible marriage, while he was around there was a sense that we still had control in our lives.

When he died, the anchor was cut free from the ship and we were left to drift whichever way the waves took us...

It's almost been 17 years since his death, and still I look back at June 19th, 2004 as the last day I had an anchor in my life. I can't help but look at his picture and only think about the divine inevitability. Not so much around his death but the period after. What is a family without an anchor? The same as a ship.

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