For those who haven’t seen my Twitter & Facebook status updates in the past couple hours, earlier today I learned that my dad died this morning.

His health has been degenerating for about 15 years. For the last 18 months or so, he’s been in an assisted living facility in San Antonio. I don’t have much information about the actual circumstances, but I’m pretty sure he died alone. My aunt, who lives in Midland, Michigan (where I grew up) doesn’t know much either at this point. The facility called my grandmother – also in Midland – this morning and then Grandma went over to my aunt’s house and told her, and then they called me. The facility has my Grandma as the second contact person, but she got the news because no one can find my half-sister Jodi, who was living somewhere in the San Antonio area but none of us can track her down now.

So, almost certainly, my father died alone in an assisted care facility bed having not been visited by a family member probably in months. This was a situation he cultivated, though.

Dad was a mean drunk and a bitter man, but most of us tried time and time again to re-establish relationships with him after several estrangements. I certainly did. He was my dad. But eventually, he pretty much made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with any of us, and soon enough he got his wish.  He spent the last years of his life essentially alone and this morning, he died alone, and my grandmother had to learn of her son’s death not from a family member, but from a nurse. And my dad brought that about by his own behavior and his own bitterness.

Still, he was my dad.

He threw my mother out of the house when I was six months old, and he somehow managed to get custody of me, then kept me from having any contact with my mother or anyone in her family for my entire childhood. I didn’t meet my mom or any of her relatives until I was 21. I sought them out at that time, and now have a fair (although infrequent) relationship with my mom. My dad was pissed when he learned that. That was just one of several rifts that came between us.

Still, he was my dad.

He was abusive to us as children and to my stepmother as well, until eventually she left him, after my step-siblings and I had gone off to colleges and my half-sister was in high school.

I have spent my adulthood being hounded by the spectre of his influence. I work hard not to be like him. I strive to be a different father than he was, a different man. Most of the weird passive-aggro navel-gazing overdramatic behaviors that many of you know me to exhibit – those are my coping tools on display.

Because he was so bitter about so many things, and it literally ate away at his psyche and his health, I desperately have tried NOT to be bitter about my past with him. I’m partially successful at it, but still, I do get bitter sometimes. There have been times I’ve hated him. Certainly times I’ve hated the him that is in me.

But I’m here, I’m okay. I’m a good person and a good father and I hope I’m a good husband and a good friend. I’m not an alcoholic, I don’t use my fists to keep people at bay, and I’ve got people who care about me, like me, and people who WANT to see me, know me, hang out with me.

Any of those things my dad ever had, he threw away.

Still, he was my dad. He gave me his love of Star Trek and comic books and football. He embedded in me a lifelong love of the Detroit Lions, who are so pathetically bad, and almost always have been. In his own ass-backward way, he took care of me and raised me when he could easily have walked away. And regardless of what happened as a result, I am who I am and I like who I am, and my dad was a big part of that.

Maybe I’m breaking some taboo about speaking ill of the dead. But this is my truth. This is my scab-ripping moment. This is the beginning of the processing that people who know and care about me have already told me is necessary in order for true healing to begin.

I journal it because, as Fred Hicks put so well in his journal yesterday, I’m a textrovert. I needed to write this so I could know how I feel about it.

Bob Bradley was my dad. I did not like him, but I love him. I’ve sort of emotionally prepared for this day for a few years now. With his health problems and continued insistence on holding to his bitterness, it was not hard to know this was coming, and in many ways, for me, it happened a long time ago. So today I sit here, kinda numb, kinda melancholy, but not really grieving. I think that may have already happened, in sort of a slow hissing leak rather than one sudden needle-pop.

On the other hand, today it is official. Today there will be no more last-minute shots at reconciliation. Today, the way it has seemed to be becomes the way it is.

Writing that last sentence may have just cracked my shell a bit. Frak.

Okay, I’ll share more when it feels appropriate. I honestly love all of you who have already sent support and condolences, and those of you whom I know are about to do so. Thanks.

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