I feel like I’m not allowed to be sad because our relationship kind of sucked. I know he loved me, in his own incomprehensible way, but I don’t know if I love him, which is confusing because uncertainty doesn’t jive with my concept of love.

The idea that I’m actually grieving over Ken’s death is just kind of ludicrous. Compared to the loss of my mom, sister, grandmother, aunts and cousins, all the people who really, really cared about him, mine is so ridiculously miniscule. All I’ve lost is a vague consistent presence of conflicting parental substance, which was in recent years more frequently positive, but historically pretty negative.

That’s probably the part that hurts most, aside from my concern for my remaining family: the overall rubbish of our time together. For its majority of years, we were thoroughly antagonistic. We learned to be civil over the past 6 years, basically since I moved out and he somewhat relinquished the fatherly role that I never wanted him to fill, and we’d only begun to connect and like each other over the last 2. And that’s it. That’s the best that we managed before he died. It’s just so…lame.

The main problem between us was that even though we held similar values, we had different ideas about how to communicate them. We both believe(d) family is important, but his way of showing that was to be a workaholic and buy his loved ones material objects. My understanding of “family is important” is that we spend a lot of time together, talk a lot, and feel emotionally connected to each other. I viewed his different interpretations as being less than my own and deemed him shallow, insensitive, and rather archaic. If I’m going to be completely honest here, I may as well throw in stupid. I’m sure he was aware of this, as a frequent subject of our arguments involved my “disrespectful attitude” which made him angry and hurt, and (as people do when they’re angry and hurt) act like an asshole, which guaranteed a really dumb cycle of injury. It was only with several hundred miles of perspective that I was able to realize that, given his rather emotionally crippled family background, he honestly did the best he could, which is a great deal more than most people can say.

And that’s the amazing part. He lived his life remarkably close to his beliefs and always did what he thought was right and even died on his own terms. Not the whole cancer part, obviously, but he worked until the day he died and passed away at home, in his own bed, surrounded by family. This is untrue for some of the greatest people to ever live, and yet it was so with Ken.