How Long Is Always?
It was the first message I had ever received from my father. It was also the last. A FOUR - MIINUTE memory.
This story was first posted in November 2023. If you have already read it, thank you! For new subscribers, I hope you find something in it that touches your heart.
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’d 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 to fend for ourselves. We never saw him again.
When I was a grown woman with a child of my own, I found my father. I’d located an old phone directory for his birthplace, a small town in South Dakota, and called every listing in the book for my family name. Searching for information was much more of a challenge in those days, of course, but I managed to 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 knowing me. He had no excuse for not finding me — I was, after all, right where he’d left me all those years ago..
He loved me at first, I know that. He wrote it in my pink satin baby book when I was three months old.
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. He did what he thought he had to do. I don’t hate him for disappearing, but I do wonder how he was able to live with himself all those years, knowing what he had done. It’s beyond my comprehension. 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 up 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 age of fifty-seven, never knowing the daughter that he’d brushed off like so much dust from his boots when he was a young man. It is sad to think of all the love he missed out on.
There is a certain melancholy in me that I have always carried under the surface, and that remains in me to this day, but it never squashed my spirit, never hindered my ability to build what has been a most amazing life. I am Katy’s daughter, after all. Indomitable and tenacious, just like her.
I remembered this one and almost couldn't bear to read it again. I can't imagine ever walking away from my kids but I know it happens. In the end, it was you father's loss. You and Katy did well. Throwing that card away was a liberation for you.
My story is the same, Sharon. Luckily, my mom found the live of her life when I was three, and a few months later he married her, adopted me, and became my father. He was the best father to me, and I never wondered about my “real” father until I was older. I never even got to hear his name or see a picture of him. So now that he's dead, ill never know those things either. At least you had a card from yours and a memory or two.