An Open Letter to the Father I Never Knew
No you can’t talk about it
And isn’t that a kind of madness
To be living by a code of silence
When you’ve really got a lot to say
- Billy Joel, Code of Silence
I heard you died last May. Well, that isn’t exactly true. I Googled you. I didn’t have a lot of hope in finding anything (and maybe I didn’t even really want to) given your surname is so common. But there it was. Your obituary.
I felt . . . nothing. I wonder what that says about me. I wonder what that says about you.
I didn’t know your name until I was 27 years old. Did you know that? I asked several times, but by the time I was 8 years old I got the message to stop asking loud and clear. So I stopped. And I got on with my life. And that whole time you lived just one town over.
I finally found out about you when mom decided she wanted to go looking for my brother. My brother? I was an only child! But no, at 27 I found out that you and she had a baby boy 9 years before you had me. I didn’t see that one coming. It shook me to my core.
I learned that I lived with you for the first 18 months of my life. You, mom…
