My father came back into my life by way of the post office.
During the summer I turned 14, I came home to a typewritten letter waiting for me on my bedspread. My dad had entered a drug treatment program — part of his rehabilitation was writing to his family about what he’d been through, and to apologize if necessary.
Apologies were necessary.
My father had disappeared five or six years before, after a custody battle and then a failure to pay child support. Since then, we’d moved away, and my mother remarried and had a second child. The few memories I had of my father were mostly of a swimming pool that made my eyes bloodshot, animals that I loved and an awful skin rash I picked up when he’d taken me to Hawaii without telling my mother.
In that first letter, he explained his addiction and the consequences it had on his life, and how when trouble descended, he’d been incapable of dealing with it, so he’d stayed loaded. Now finished with an 28-day rehab program, he planned to remain in Monterey, California — a city with a historically calming effect on him since his stint at Fort Ord when he was 18.
He closed the letter: “There will be a new twist to what I do, how I do it and who I choose to do it with. I am feeling stronger every day, but I didn’t get sick in one day and I don’t think I’ll get well in one month either. Would like to hear from you. Hope you understand.”
I was 14. I didn’t understand. But I had a father that wanted to hear from me, so I wrote back. And then he did. And then I did. For 17 years.
Courtesy of Geralyn Broder Murray
His letters gave me what I’d been missing during the first 14 years of my life. Every typewritten page, every piece of personal stationery with his left-handed scrawl, managed to fill another gaping hole in my heart with something like love.
When I began writing for my high school newspaper and sent him my clippings, my dad, an aspiring writer with a deep wish for a…
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