How Long Is Always?

It was the first message I had ever received from my father. Sadly, it was also the last. A five-minute memory.

It was just one line in a birthday card. “The reason I never wrote you is because I didn’t know where you was. Love, your dad.” It was the first message I’d ever had from my father. And it was the last. I was twenty-four years old at the time and remember staring at that birthday card for a long time, brushing my fingers over the illustration of a garden cart full of flowers. I found it touching, somehow, that he’d remembered when I was born.

He had been a troubled young soldier in 1945, stationed in California, never deployed, and after three years of a rather fragile marriage, he’d decided he didn’t want a wife and child after all and simply walked away, leaving us behind. We never saw him again.

When I was a grown woman wth a child of my own, I found my father. I’d located an old phonebook for Lemmon, South Dakota, his birthplace, and I called every listing in the book with my family name. Searching for information was much more of a challenge in those days, of course, but I did find my father’s sister. “He’s been living up there in Big Timber, Montana, working as a ranch hand, doing odd jobs for many years,“ my Auntie told me. “He never married again.” I wrote to him, and after a few weeks, I got the card in the mail

“The reason I never wrote you was because I didn’t know where you was. Love your dad.” How many times over the years had I taken that sentence apart, word by word, hoping to find something more he was trying to say, some hidden affection or explanation or apology. I never found any. I kept that card for a long time and one day just tossed it out. I could see no reason to keep it; he had no interest in seeing me. He had no excuse for not finding me — I was, after all, right where he’d left me.

I don’t forgive him for disappearing, but I don’t hate him either. He must have loved me at first. He wrote in my pink satin baby book, “Little daughter you are the cutest little girl I have ever seen or hope to see. May your life be full of happiness and may God bless you every day of your life. Always your daddy.” I have accepted now that ‘always’ is not a fixed time, and he did what he thought he had to do.

I do wonder, though, how he was able to live with himself all those years, knowing what he had done. It is beyond my comprehension. I am sad for him. How does a man get up every morning and go to bed every night burdened with such guilt? Did he even feel any guilt? What sort of rationalization does a man make when he forsakes a wife and a child, leaving them to live or die as may be? Did he ever wonder what happened to us? Did he keep a photograph of us tucked away in his sock drawer? The questions will never be answered.

My father died at the young age of fifty-seven. After he was buried and all his debts were settled, his entire remaining estate was sent to me — three hundred dollars to a daughter that he had brushed off like so much dust from his boots those many years ago. There is a certain sadness in me that will remain, but it does not and did not dampen my spirit or my ability to build a great life. ( I am my mother’s daughter.) But three hundred dollars was not what I needed.