In a sense, the term “lies” seems a bit strong, as for the most part, what this list entails is pretty harmless. But sugarcoating any of it by calling them “untruths” or “tall tales” or anything like that isn’t going to make any of it more true. Some of them, I can’t be sure if they were exaggerations and had actual grains of truth, or if they were total fantasies he indulged himself with; who knows, maybe some of the things he told me were deliberate falsehoods meant to entertain, and I was too young at the time to see through them. Well, hindsight is 20/20, they say, and he’s been gone for eighteen years, so it isn’t like I can call him up and ask. Truthfully, even if I could, I suspect I wouldn’t. I learned as a teenager when he was laying in a hospital bed, freshly returned to the east coast from his California dream turned nightmare, that attempting to give my father a reality check would not only be futile, it would do more harm than good. I was about 16 when I last saw him, and 18 when he died. I’m 36 now. I’ve spent half of my life with my father gone from this world, but he was gone from me well before that. I let him have his delusions and walked away, because there was nothing else I could do for him, and nothing else he could do for me.

Lie #1: He once dated Steve Perry’s cousin.

Lie #2: He once acquired a signed Eric Clapton guitar for a sick old lady he knew who was a huge fan.

Lie #3: Leonard Nimoy is a distant cousin of ours.

Lie #4: When there is conflict, one should apologize, even when one has done nothing wrong.

Lie #5: My mother will take care of everything.

Lie #6: We were best friends and that would never change.

Lie #7: He loved me more than anything. (Instinctively I want to say that he didn’t love me more than he loved himself, but I believe the opposite is actually closer to the truth — I don’t think he loved himself at all, and therefore loving anyone else was quite a shot in the dark for him.)

Truth #1: Always be as observant as you can.

Truth #2: Life is short. (And his postscript to that was, fuck it, do what you want.)

Yes, life is short; he proved that all too well when he died at age 46 after decades of disregarding his health needs as a type 1 diabetic. By the time he died, he was blind, could no longer walk, had had several heart attacks and a stroke, lost several fingers and toes, was on dialysis. I believe the official cause of death was kidney failure, but that’s only because you can’t put “fuck it attitude” on death certificates, to the best of my knowledge. This is a man whose physical health steadily declined when I was a young child, and whose mental health went down the drain right along with it. Between his own struggles and my mother’s toxicity, it all became too much for him when he attempted suicide in early September of 1999. Three months after that, he left us for a woman and her two daughters in California who he’d met in an internet chat room. Six months after that, I’d gone to California with the intention of staying, but to make a long and painful story short, in the end, California hadn’t worked out for either of us. I have gained enough clarity in the years since to truly understand his need to get out of his relationship with my mother. Having extricated myself from her narcissistic entanglement in 2018, I’ve come to appreciate his desperation to escape all that, and I know he wanted to find anything at all that could possibly make him feel good.

At 36 years old, though, I also know that life simply doesn’t always feel good. Sometimes it feels just plain awful. It’s something you just have to accept as part of the bigger picture. He never knew how to do that. He never figured it out. There’s a part of me that wants to believe that everything in life has a higher purpose, even if we don’t always get to know what it is. It could be that the pain my father endured his whole life serves the higher purpose of helping me to figure out what he never could — that yes, life is short, which is precisely why we cannot just say “fuck it” and do what we want. We have to balance the good, the bad, and the ugly. I don’t like the implication that what my father went through was necessary, but I suppose I’m just trying to find meaning and value, in case maybe he didn’t die in vain. He’s dead, and it falls to me to make that mean something, I guess. I’m the one left carrying a legacy full of pain, and I want that particular inheritance to run out so that it’s not passed on to my own daughter.

That, I think, is the honest truth of it all.