So this year marks a different observance of this most singularly horrible day in my life. My little girl would have turned 21, or in at least a legal sense, become an adult.
As you've read so often on this anniversary, it's hard to believe that it's been this long and she would be that old had she lived. That part you know.
Words fail today. It's rare that I don't have words on this anniversary because I've always had some way of conveying some sort of feeling, some expression of hope and happiness despite the fact that she never drew a breath of air.
Not this year. Not today.
Instead of thinking of what might have happened had she lived in the best of situations, this year I can only think of the reality of how things happened and what she would have had to have gone through at the hands of her parents.
She would have been 3 years old and waiting on her brother to be born when her mother and I separated, four years old when my dad passed away and 5 years old when her mother and I divorced.
Finally, she'd have been 11 when I got sick and lost my foot. We could have imagined a life better than this for her, and you've read them here, but reality took hold this year and I felt I owed it to her and her memory to write them here.
I do so not to turn this into a bigger downer than this blog usually is, but to ask myself the same question to her that I always do every year, and one I ask silently to my son, who himself will never answer it and indeed, never fully understand the pain his father carries every day:
"Have I done a good job, being your dad?"
Happy birthday, my sweet Angel,
...your daddy still loves you.
October 29, 2017.
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