My father died in December of 2005, five days before Christmas.
By that time, Tara and I had moved to Pennsylvania; we'd gotten our own place, bought a car, and gotten ourselves settled - broke, but settled - far away from any of my family.
By that time, my brother's son was edging up on a year old; he and his wife were first talking about buying a house.
Now, my son is almost two months old. My brother's daughter is now edging up on 8 months old, and his son just turned 3.
The two of us owe my father a great debt, and neither of us really ever acknowledged it, that I knew about.
I was in the Army, and had been there a while, before I really grew up enough to separate my father's craziness from the things he did right, and was almost 26 before I was really able to talk to him without getting angry and frustrated every time.
I wish I had managed it sooner. My father was right about a lot of things. He was wrong about a lot of things, too, but the things he was right about tended to be the important ones, and the things he was wrong about... didn't.
I miss my father. In the last 5 years of his life, I got more good advice, and a hell of a lot more knowledge of how to be a father, than in my whole life prior to that. I miss watching football with him; I miss arguing politics with him across Fox News Sunday (lol) and I miss just talking to him.
I learned a hell of a lot from my father. I only really knew how much when I first held my son; a lot of the things he taught me never really made sense until then.
I learned to be a father from him.
I hope I do as good a job as he did.
And I hope he's watching me do it.
