For my daughter on her 21st birthday.

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.

It was 20 years ago today: my precious Angel.

The annual post.

She'd be 20 today.  Adulthood eve.  My vision of her is a blonde, blue-eyed young woman in her second or third year of college, working and being the wholesome,  all-American girl her mom and I would be proud of.

Just like every other fifty-ish daddy does,  I'd suppose.

It's hard to believe this much time has passed since that fateful day in 1996 when she was born. 

More and more I wonder how life would have been if she had survived and came to us healthy and alive.   I can't help it.

Movies often imagine how things would be if we went back in time and the history we had were changed off the path they went, and I've been back and forth about how I wou l d handle it if I were offered that opportunity.

Sure, I'd love to go back to the point in time where she could have been saved and born alive but what would that have changed? 

I don't know, and if life were to have been on the same heading would her mother and I split up and divorced like we did? 

If it happened exactly as it did, she'd turn three shortly after we separated and just about to turn five when the divorce was final and I'm not sure I'd want to have her witness how we fell apart.

Especially with her brother being born in between time and all the events that happened within that mix...her grandfather's death in 2002...my illness and amputation in 2008...

I tell you, it boggles the mind.

Hindsight allows us the freedom to imagine the world history in the last 20 years going EXACTLY the way it did but realistically it probably wouldn't.  

That said, when my time comes and we meet in the afterlife I hope she approves of me and how I've lived my life and been a dad for her brother.

I hope she forgives me for what happened with her mother and I.  I hope she forgives her too.  She should know that we have it our best shot, and I hope she's not too upset with either of us for not trying harder to make us work.

There's a lot we'll be talking about when I get there, I fear, now that I think about it.

Every year, it's little harder to write this entry.  No way am I going to stop writing them though. 

Happy 20th birthday sweetie. 

Daddy loves you.  <3 <3 <3.