I promised this entry for yesterday, but things have been too hectic and it's taken some additional time to feel finished for now. A year ago this past Monday (21 Dec), I was in Florida visiting my wife's family for the holidays. It had been a year of upheaval and re-prioritization and so on and all the so on and so forth that people in their twenties go through. As Guillermo del Toro put it in an interview Jeff did with him for the release of Hellboy II (and I'm paraphrasing), "in your twenties, everything is terrible, and everything is always going wrong, and everything is just crashing down around you." In the late evening of that cold, dark Sunday night, I got a call from my mother to let me know that my father'd had a "catastrophic" stroke according to the doctors, and that if I could manage to financially, "that [I] should come so that I could say goodbye".

I never had anything that could be misconstrued as a perfect (or necessarily good) relationship with my father.