Life goes on they say. I hate that saying. Maybe because it’s always easiest for the one saying it. The one who has no idea what loss is and the pain and remorse that trails it like a never ending parade of grief.

There are so many things I’d like to tell my father. I don’t know if I would try to punch him or hug him if he climbed out of his grave right now and said he was sorry.

The tears have stopped though. I’d never imagine that kneeling here before his headstone for the first time would make my tears stop.

His life was a blur of booze and abuse. I can still hear his hateful shouting – the airborne anger riveting through the thin walls of my bedroom where I hunched, shaking, wishing I could shrink down next to a tiny dust particle on the floor boards.
I remember the smell of him. Hot sweat mixed with rum seeping from his pores, filling our home with a sickly, volatile odor.

Life goes on is just another cliche. So I made up my own saying, one that pertains to me.

Life can now begin.

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This is in large part a true story. I've decided after a while that this person is my father. His dad, my grampa, whom I never met, was a miserable drunk. Tragically, both of my paternal grandparents drank themselves to death within a year of eachother in 1969. Although my father maintains that he was never physically hit, his mother was very frequently -- and the whole househould had to suffer nightly. The verbal abuse was the worst though, and it was constant and directly affected my father in ways he won't admit. This is how I think he must have felt growing up and all of his mixed emotions when his father died.

updated Jan 22 '09 by Tad_Winslow