My father would have been 65 years old today. He passed away 9 years ago from lung cancer.
Jerry adopted me when I was five. We always had a complicated relationship. He struggled with alcoholism and wasn’t around much when I was growing up. His disease kept our household in a constant state of crisis. We also had little in common. Our relationship became very strained after I moved out, and I didn’t see much of him in his final years. I was on the other side of the country when he died.
Today, I’m sad because we never got that opportunity to know each other as adults. I wonder if I could have put aside all of the crap. My perspectives are so different now that I’m a father. I can’t say that things between us would be better, but we should have had that chance to fix things.