I Miss You Daddy ...

He would keep repeating the same thing over and over again, and neither I nor my younger sister, Nikki, could understand what he was saying. We would both blow it off and try to focus on something different. That’s around the time when I got scared for my Daddy. I was scared there was something mentally wrong with him. But now I realize, he was just drunk, and I never noticed.

For the past month before we realized he was dead, he was helping his best friend John (or Uncle John as me and Nikki called him) with his wedding. On the weekend me and Nikki were supposed to come to his apartment in Oceanside, he was gone for Uncle John’s wedding. Both me and Nikki were fine with that. We always figured we’d see him again and that he’d have fun at the wedding. So Nikki and I went on with our normal lives. I went to school and softball practice everyday, played all my softball games as starting catcher, and did very well that week. We even had STAR testing and I think I was doing alright. My grades weren’t exactly up to par with my mom, but I was finally turning them around and everything looked good. I hadn’t heard from my Daddy in a week though, and he usually called everyday just to check up on us. I regret not noticing that he hadn’t called and feel partly responsible for not taking notice that he was gone.

The day we found out about his death, I had told my mom he had sexually abused me, found out he’d been an alcoholic for 11 years, and realized I hadn’t talked to him in a while. Putting all this together I new something bad was going to happen. I could just feel it. Nikki was at a friend’s house and my mom called her and told her to come back to the house. She needed to ask her if SHE had ever been sexually abused by my Daddy, since I was the only one that ever told her about it. As I was sitting in my room, crying and waiting for my sister to come home, my mom got a phone call. It was from my Aunt Barbara, all the way out in Watsonville. I didn’t know who called and my mom raced upstairs to talk. My stepfather said “Don’t worry about it,” and I new something was wrong. I kept trying to ask what was wrong and he just kept blowing me off and told me to hold on and wait for my mom.