How sad that I mourned him before his death, that I could drive the distance and see his face, but to do so would be the same as looking at an open casket. Because I could never look at him the same way that I used to; I could never be in the moment. I was snapping pictures in my mind, remembering, storing, so that I could remember the dry skin of shaking hands, the unshaven face, the way spit hung from dead teeth of a man that was almost dead himself. This is a man that would commit suicide, not in an instant, but slowly every day, a man with stains of Jager on his lips and long sleeved shirts over Walmart tees that I’d buy him for Christmas with dirty jeans and white tennis shoes that have seen the yard every day. I’m capturing the man whose hair lays under a “College of Charleston Dad” hat, yet I don’t know if he ever knew the meaning of the word “dad” because dad means you love your daughter, and he did, he does, but never as much as he loved alcohol, never has it been true since the night in the bar when he left with my mother to the night we left when she’d had enough. Never has the love for me been stronger than his love for a drink. And they tell me that I should ask for his money to help me get my degree because otherwise it’d go to the bar every day, but I can’t ask for a hundred dollars or two and pretend that I wouldn’t give all the money in this world, live in the debt of my student loans for the rest of my life, just to have my father choose me. Not once, not in moments, not in declares to go to rehab, not on temporary terms, but every day. I want my father to choose me every day. I don’t want his first thought to be of me, but to be of the drink, and then the choice to be made; I want the choice to be me. But it has never been me, and I don’t suppose that it won’t ever be me, but I can’t see those days in my mind because those days are hidden underneath albums of his stitches and crashed vehicles and poems of empty words and broken promises.

I mourned him before he was was even dead. I felt grief in every sense of the word, in every sleepless night of tear-stained pillows, of anticipation that the next-morning would be the morning that the phone would ring, telling me that it was over. I mourned him before he was dead. I mourned him then… and I still am.