Death, Grief, and Pre-Pandemic Unhappiness

I do not remember the last conversation I had with my father before he died. The weeks and months before his passing were like the months and years of our life together: full of starts and stops. We tried to create the relationship we knew that fathers and sons should have but that we didn’t, because he left our family when I was young. There were times when I called and he did not answer. In other cases, I missed his attempts to connect.