It’s been one year since the world became, by some small measure, a better place. And like my mom’s passing, I’ve dreamt about him every night for the last two weeks. Except in these dreams I’m not crying out for a parent I long to see and hold again. I’m not begging for one more conversation or asking forgiveness for all the little things that stopped mattering the moment I watched her take her last breath. No. These dreams are filled with a history of violence. Loaded shotguns held to our throats. Him begging us to give him any reason to pull the trigger. Our fault, after all. There is blood. There are bruises. Terror. And that is only a snapshot of the psychological havoc he wreaked on this psyche during his days among the living.
If I believed in heaven or hell, I’d be convinced he was intentionally haunting me from his reserved seat in the deepest depths of the great below. My father was a violent man, after all. Not simply a man who committed violent acts, but a man who understood the world through brutality. Violence was a language and a currency. Violence was how he reminded the people around him that he was in control. Pain was never the threat; it was a constant. Death was. Murder was a joke to him. A flip of a switch. Nothing more. He could talk about ending a human life with the casualness other men reserved for swatting a fly, because somewhere along the way he had convinced himself that fear was respect and control was love.
His father was violent too. Another deeply wounded man who turned his wounds outward and made a wife and children pay for whatever had been done to him. Men who abused the people who depended on him and seemed, at times, to take pleasure in their torment. Cruelty passed from father to son until it became an inheritance. A family tradition no one asked for. And my father carried it well. But eventually there were no more sons. There was a daughter instead. And somehow, the least likely recipient of that inheritance would become its terminus too.
He lived something far more sinister than a double life. There were people who knew him for his charm, his humor, his generosity. People who remember him as funny, charismatic, larger than life. His work crew called him Diablo, a nickname he savored, taking such pride in the implication that he had it stamped across his hard hat. But those were only a version of him. The latter closest to the truth. And somehow, he still managed to cause as much damage when he was gone as he did when he was home. There are people who remember my father as a good man. Those are the people who never truly knew him at all.
He beat me and tried to break me. He beat my mother, and he won. And I still cannot reconcile the contradiction of a man who spent his life insisting his own mother was a saint while harboring so much hatred for women. Maybe sainthood was simply another form of control. Women could be saints. Women could be whores. Women could be mothers. Women could be possessions. But God forbid they become people with minds of their own.
At home, he liked to play God. Perhaps Diablo wasn’t enough. He decided when there would be peace. He decided when there would be peril. He decided who deserved punishment. And for a very long time, he decided who was allowed to speak. Because bruises heal. Blood dries. Broken things can sometimes be replaced. But teaching someone to distrust their own voice can last decades. It taught me that truth had consequences. That speaking could make things worse. That silence could keep you alive. So I learned to keep quiet, to swallow words and survive.
And now he is dead! For one full year, the world has felt safer. There is a profound relief that comes with that, and in sharing this truth, finally. I wish somewhere, somehow, he could hear me now: I hope he is rolling over in his forever-unmarked grave, still adorned with the dead remnants of foliage he did not deserve, left untouched because the people who were supposed to care about him are simply waiting for the day when no one remembers his name. And perhaps that sounds cruel. But cruelty is another inheritance too. Of which I decline.
Because the greatest insult I can give my father is not my hatred. It is becoming everything he could never be. Gentle. Compassionate. Safe. Trusted. A lover. Of course I have his rage inside me. How could I not? But I have learned that rage does not require violence. Strength does not require fear. Respect does not require obedience. And love does not leave bruises.
Every wound he left open, every scar, every ugly thing handed down through generations of trauma was supposed to become part of me. I will carry evidence of that man for the rest of my life. But carrying something is not the same as becoming it. And in spite of him, I have risen far beyond anything he could have ever been.
His initials will not be passed down. His name will not become some treasured family relic. His violence will not be romanticized into stories about how complicated he was or excuses about the terrible things that happened to him. I know terrible things happened to him. I also know what he chose to do with them. That distinction matters. His father wounded him. He wounded us. And I refuse to pass on that pain just because I am wounded too. That is where his history ends. Now take this last name!
A year ago, my father died. He spent his life believing violence gave him power. Maybe it did. It made rooms quiet. It made people obey. It made children afraid. It made women bleed. But it could not make him loved. And it did not make him immortal. And I look forward to the day when no one remembers his name. But they will remember me.
BLAH BLAH BLACK SHEEP 