Personal Narrative: My Father's Death

Since I was a young child I knew something was missing from my life. I knew my dad was gone, long gone before I even put the puzzle together and knew how to miss him or who he was. My father was a relatively outgoing child, or so I have been told. He was never one to back down from a challenge, which likely is why he got into the things he did. My dad thought he was invincible, he was young, as was my mom, when I made my entrance into their lives. My father was nineteen and my mom seventeen. I crept into their lives, disturbing my father’s teenage partying lifestyle and making my best attempt at forcing him to grow up and be a man. Only he didn’t want to give up his friends or his parties, and so he didn’t. He let my mom go, he returned to …show more content…
What kind of drug, I’m not sure. I never pressed for details. Once I thought my mom said methadone but I am not sure. It began with drinking, then smoking marijuana and ended up at pills. I was lied to about the way my dad died until I was 8 or 9. My mom never hid the real reason, she never lied, but she just never wanted to talk about it in detail. My grandparents had always told me it was a heart attack that claimed my father's life that night. His sister finally told me the truth when we're cleaning out my grandfather's mother's home after she passed. She had found his obituary in a box under the bed and let me read it in full. The obituary didn’t hold details, but the newspaper article with it did. “Three More Lives Claimed by Drugs”. Her mother was angry with her, and I remember them fighting, my aunt, eighteen at the time, declared that I deserved to know. She loved her brother and had helped cover up his mistakes for too long. My grandparents claimed to have no knowledge of his addiction until he overdosed. Personally, I think they were afraid to admit it to …show more content…
The night before his death my grandfather put him into bed, as he was passed out on his bedroom floor. If doctors had got to him then, he might still be alive, but hindsight is 20/20 as the old saying goes. The months prior were hard for his family. The last thing his sister told him was that she hated him, mere hours before his death. Now she lives by the “never go to bed angry” philosophy. About nine months before his overdose, he threatened suicide if my mom didn’t return to a relationship with him. He had a gun pointed to his head, begging her to please come back. She asked him if he would stop using and he told her he didn’t want to. She told him that she would not have me grow up in that environment, calmed him down and told my grandfather to lock the gun cabinet. This incident has always made me wonder if his overdose was actually an accident, but my mom is convinced it wasn’t