My father died ten years ago today. This is not the longest he’s been out of my life.

My parents divorced when I was three. I have no memory of my father in the house, though many of him around the holiday or birthdays. For a while. He eventually stopped coming around and after I turned 9 or 10 he simply vanished from my life. For a long time, I felt this was particular and personal. I know now it’s not, that my father proved to many an enigma and a ghost long before his death.

I never dealt with my father’s death in any comprehensive way. I definitely suffered from it and made decisions influenced by it, but I never allowed the ‘grieving process’ to unfold let alone commence. Two years after he died, I left my job, moved to Ireland, and completely invested myself in someone else’s grief. That pulled me so far away from my father that now his death influences me only like the Sun does Pluto. I orbit this distant thing, but it’s indistinguishable from the rest of the sky.

I don’t know what to say about my father. 

I suspect we’re very similar. One thing I learned later in life is that I’m autistic. I don’t know if he was, but we both struggled to manage relationships and communication. I don’t disappear on people – that happens to me a lot – but I do retreat. I was unconscious of this until recently. I also had no idea that at least part of the reason I haven’t processed his death is that I never really process things. They simply get caught in the pattern buffer until maybe someday they exit through writing in indirect ways. I’ve learned that aspects of my life emerge through my fiction, it has little therapeutic value.

I once imagined I’d be an essayist like writers I very much admire. I’d craft my life experiences into story. I don’t have those skills in my toolkit. When biographical elements occur in my fiction, they help in my awareness of patterns or behaviors, but the underlying pain or emotion remains. Nothing works out of the system, and I didn’t know why until only recently.

I developed a better understanding of myself after my father died, but not of him or us. I unmasked. I suffered the gross instability that comes with shedding defense mechanisms you didn’t know existed or were load-bearing elements to your personality. I yo-yo a lot these days when it comes to managing emotion and stress, especially because I have another ailing parent and I am myself ailing. I suffer from Long COVID and some days it’s hard to breathe.

What I’ve understood about myself in these last few years is that masking may have been necessary. I am by nature a sharer. As a kid, I digested and then regurgitated any and all information. This induces a reaction in most people, not always welcome, and in my household sharing of any sort was discouraged. I bent myself into knots to not be who I was and so by the time I was in college, I stopped sharing. The damage this inflicted on me is only now beginning to become clear.

I also never realized, because I was suppressing my instincts, how necessary it was for me to purge all this information. Thoughts simply scream around the pattern buffer in my head and if they don’t exit, they tangle up in knots that are impossible to describe. This creates difficulty in communication, inconsistency in the Darby people meet, and a tendency to enforce distances. As my father tried to engage me as an adult, he collided with this wall I had built. We always bounced off each other, quick to pain over wounds that never healed. And so I know little about him.

This is what I know about my father.

Joesph. R. Harn was born on August 16, 1947, to Joseph and Betty Harn. He was married four times, possibly five, I don’t know. He has five children. Casey, Sean, myself, Aaron, and Kayleen. He has many grandchildren. He served in the United States Navy during the Vietnam War. He was traumatized by his experiences. He was an alcoholic. He stayed sober for over thirty years and served as a sponsor for over thirty men and women, many of whom attended his funeral. He was passionate about our family’s history, our origins in Ireland, and Irishness in all its splendor. He admired, I think, my interest in those subjects as well.

I also know that my father told me things he told no one else. These ranged from his experiences in the war, both my grandfather’s experiences in World War II to the extent they told him, and his struggles with alcoholism. He told me of his guilt and cowardice, his faithlessness, and he talked as if he were talking to a mirror. I suppose in some ways he was.

I believe he confided these things in me because I was a stranger. Strangers open up to me, as I found when I fled my job and America for Ireland in 2014. I met a woman unable to articulate her grief to her friends or family or the indifferent sky, but she could to me. 

I am beyond understanding either, I fear. Or processing. Or gaining ‘closure.’ Or insert banal term here. I am unable to process the negative space my father occupies. But I try to voice it now. I try to share now to be who I am and acknowledge who he was. I write about the negative space.

I don’t know if I can close these gaps or mend these wounds. I don’t know if I understand what those things mean. I only know that my father gave me a voice. I have a lot to say.

I just need to take a deep breath first.