March’s Fragment

. . .my father’s breathless words: “this is all your fault” broke open my “daddy wounds” and for better or worse, I spent a few years holding space for Laura the victim. For a long time, I refused to talk about his final day before he was placed on life support. I needed to lick my wounds and own how my perceived place within my family was confirmed by his words. I could have simply lost myself to those words, my big chance to be a victim of a dying man’s ramblings. It would have been easy to forever internalize them and color the rest of my life as a ready excuse for bitterness, emotional distance, and anger.

image taken sometime in the middle of the last century