For All The Less Than Perfect Fathers Out There

I lost my father at the age of twenty-nine.  It was not unexpected.  He was terminally ill throughout my twenties, and chronically depressed during my teens.  Ever since I can remember, he had a death wish.  He would talk about death as though it were waiting right around the corner, making statements like, “I probably won’t be alive to see that,” whenever I mentioned graduation or getting married or having kids.  His pending death consumed my life.           

                Nonetheless, he remains the meter by which I judge all men.  My father was a profoundly flawed man, and still every man who came after him would fall short of what I viewed as his unrealized greatness.

                My father could have been a contender.  He was extremely intelligent, witty, good-looking (I look exactly like him, but those characteristics don’t transfer well to a woman, IMHO) and should have been successful.    Except for one thing.  Depression.  It turned minor setbacks into major life-changing events and incapacitated him at times.  He would tell me “when the going gets tough, the tough get going,” but most of the time he himself gave up.  He gave up on life long before it gave up on him.  He was dead in 2004 at the age of 59, felled by a form of skin cancer that is 99.9% curable, because he didn’t go to a doctor until it had spread everywhere. 

                Yet his legacy lives on, in me.  He believed in me.  From the moment I first said I wanted to be a writer, he encouraged me.  He thought I was brilliant and perfect, even when no one agreed, including me.  He knew I could do it.  More than that, he knew I would do it.  He correctly stated he wouldn’t be alive to see it.  Every time I finish a book, I feel his pride in me, that I never gave up, never quit, and always believed.  Without his unshaking confidence in me, I would not be an author today.  Life would have gotten in the way until my tomorrows all ran out.

                My dream became his.

                He’s with me, urging me not to give up on my dream, even when there are obstacles standing in my way. 

                So, it is in that spirit that I do my official launch of Lost in Hardyland, a story about a father and daughter attempting to work through their differences when they are nothing alike.  Brad Hardy, like my own father, is a profoundly flawed man.  But also like my father, his love for his children is his redemption.  When I was finishing up the book and planning its release, I decided to try something different, to offer it for free on Father’s Day weekend, for all of us dreamers out there with fathers who believed in us.  And for all the daughters and sons with less than perfect fathers who became our heroes anyway.

                Happy Father’s Day, Dad.

               

                https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07D6CXZ9Q