The Somnambulist

Photo by Alfons Morales on Unsplash

Richard knew he was dying and chose not to tell his daughter, Jeni. He didn’t offer her the chance to say goodbye.

What kind of parent doesn’t say goodbye to their only child, knowing they’re dying? The kind who has hardened his heart—not just to her, but to many of us who ever loved him. What he did was cruel.

I learned about his decision two days after he died, and it made me sick from my throat down into my belly, like I’d swallowed something rotten.

What a pathetic man. What a waste of a life.

All the lies he must have told himself to keep going, to live without conscience.

I suppose the good news is that he didn’t kill anyone. At least not physically.

But the toll his life took—on me, on Jeni, on his first wife Robbi (Jeni’s mother), on our mother, and on Mary—was immense. I’m sure there were others.

Mary, his girlfriend in the late 1970s, became a nun after Richard beat her and their therapist.

What a shame that even at the end, he had no awakening.
He sleepwalked through his life.

Shall I call him The Somnambulist?

A man who lived with his eyes and heart closed
leaving souls broken in his wake
and if he looked back
he said it was their own fault,
and he did nothing wrong.

He harmed his granddaughter, his daughter, his mother, and me.

How many others?

I remember a girl named Nancy he dated when he was 17. He took her virginity and, on her 16th birthday, instead of saying “Happy Birthday,” he said, “You can’t say sweet sixteen never been nothing.” A cruel twist on “Sweet sixteen, never been kissed.” He related the story to me with great glee, like he was proud of his own cleverness. I wonder now, all these decades later, what impact his cruelty had on her life.

Did he ever feel even the smallest amount of guilt?

Why did he think he needed guns? Why did he love them?

He could have known so much love from the women in his life. I suppose his wife of 41 years, Susan, was enough for him. Or maybe she enabled him to believe he was justified.

He used our mother’s love and then, in her final days, discarded her. “I feel tossed me out like the trash,” she said to me on the last day she ever spoke, two days before she died.

I hope wherever he is now, he’s being shown what he refused to see. What he wouldn’t face in life. There was so much he needed to learn.

Why did I ever feel guilty about anything when someone like him went through life guilt-free? How does a man move through the world thinking he’s the victim, while leaving broken lives strewn behind his decades?

Even now, he leaves his only child with another wound. He could have gifted her the unconditional love of a parent, but chose to leave more pain.

I believe if he’d chosen a different wife, he might have been redeemed. But what kind of woman stays with a man so broken, so unwilling to heal?

I almost feel sad for him.
Almost.

Right now, I’m saddest for his daughter—for the father she had, and the goodbye she didn’t get.

I’ve had time to live with who he was. Time to heal.
But he wasn’t my father.

He was hers. And now he’s dead.