My father died 15 years ago. I was 18. I am in contact with exceedingly few people these days who knew him. Even then, that contact is sparse (no judgment, it just is what it is).

As such, my father generally feels about as real to me these days as the fictional characters who occasionally take up residence inside my head and demand I write their stories. He’s got a vivid and undeniable presence but he’s as tangible as a phantom.

Father’s Day used to be miserable for me, but it’s gotten a little bit easier since having a kid of my own. I have a readymade excuse to focus on the family I have currently, and push back the pain of twilit memories of the one I used to have, or should have had. I don’t know that time has dulled the pain of losing my father (and all the drama that led up to it). I suspect it’s more that the pain has had enough time to make itself at home, furnish the compartment inside my heart where it lives, with plenty of cozy trappings that cushion the ache of loss. That compartment is decked out like a gilded palace by now, compared to the dank feel of the cavernous space where the pain of my mother’s toxic abuse resides. It’s Versailles versus the Bastille. But I digress.

For all its cozy secure space to subsist in, there’s an irritability about Father’s Day that emerges in me that I don’t know how to explain outside of my own mind and body. So I try to bear it quietly. I don’t ignore it; I know that doesn’t work. I just strive for a balance of happy and haunted on days like today.

I know I’m not alone in this. So I say unto you – it is okay to be both happy and haunted today. And every day. But notably on days like today.