The So back in the late 70s, when I was still in middle school, my mom and dad went through a really nasty divorce.

When dad disappeared for a week, Mom tried to reassure me and my brother by saying that he was on a work trip.

But when he came home, they spent the next couple of days arguing before he left for good.

Now, he didn't disappear or anything. He moved up to Crescent City into a nice house by the harbor.

But since he didn't fight for custody, we kind of got this sense that he just wasn't interested

in being a dad anymore.

The most he ever talked about it was when he called on my 26th birthday.

Mom never had a good word to say about him after the divorce,

and she said he was a deadbeat, that he'd gone nuts,

that he was off someplace having a midlife crisis because he was a selfish, thoughtless a-hole. Dad laughed when I told him that, and he didn't disagree either. He also apologized for being so distant, but explained his life

had taken a horrible turn right around the time he and mom divorced. He said I might not understand

until I was a dad myself, and that sometimes a man has to do

what's right, even if it means sacrificing everything he's worked for.

He sounded pretty drunk at the time, so I've never really put much thought or faith into

what he had to say, and I didn't know it at the time, but that was the last chance that I'd

ever get to talk to him.

Around seven months later, Mom called me in the middle of the night. All she said was,

your father's dead. And then she passed the phone to my brother so he could talk. Dad suffered a

heart attack while taking a swim in his backyard pool. No one found him for a couple of days, and mom had to go identify his body.

She came home drunk in a cab and had to go pick up her car the next day.

We held a closed casket funeral for Dad in the week that followed.

Then me and my brother helped Mom deal with all the inheritance stuff.

...