My dad’s memorial was this past weekend.

I’ve never handled funerals well. This one was particularly threatening to my sanity, and not just because it was my dad. I’ve never quite meshed with my stepfamily. Not quite because of the common child-of-divorce delusion that their parents should be together. I never really believed that, even during their brief early stint of that. More because of the subliminal charge of my stepmother’s bathroom and kitchen renovations alone costing more than my entire house and then some.

There’s bitterness on my end about this a’plenty, don’t worry. But the superiority (and I’m plenty fucking sure at this point in my life bitterness is just a form of superiority) goes both ways. She’s of the old-school lie that hard work equals success. Why haven’t I done that, yet, then?

At the funeral, my dad’s friend told a story about his early work in prisons. They’d been looking to hire an intern, and my dad had set his heart on an ex-con with no experience. His partner and friend argued with him, and in a startling and rare hitch in volume, my dad had interrupted with “Just hire the guy.”

That was how he was. He did not often raise his voice. He insisted, very rarely. When he did, people listened. When he didn’t–

My dad died of young onset dementia. His whole life was his brain, and while it was killing him, I was recovering. I sometimes get up in my head, think about it — when was the last time he might’ve been truly present.

If I’d been high, then.

I’ve been clean five+ years, and he’s been sick for longer. Thinking that way is wallowing. He was present often. Just, still himself. Just, quiet.

He’d speak sometimes, all of a sudden, clear and sharp in the present day. We’d stop, and we’d listen.

“There’s more power in silence than you’d like to admit,” he told me once.

More bravery, too.