The Weight of Absence

My father not being active in much of my life still impacts me to this day. I got to know him more as an adult, but his absence influenced me more than his presence ever did.

When he passed away in 2016, I felt that absence even more, just in a different way. Instead of painful childhood memories of him missing milestones, I was wrestling with a flood of things I never knew about him. Questions I never got to ask. Things I'll never know. Those haunt me even more than anything I lived through.