Grieving The Parent Who Never Was: Reflecting on My Absent Father’s Suicide

By Haley O’Halloran

* Content Warning - Suicide*

Being raised by a single mother is its own type of grief. You mourn the loss of any father-daughter dance, bite your tongue when people ask you what you got your dad for Father’s Day, wish it wasn’t just you at home to explain to your mother how iTunes works. But this grief was something that I was always willing to carry for two reasons.

I was extremely scared of my father and extremely close with my mother; she always played the role of both parents. On a Monday evening, I learned that my estranged father had killed himself. Amidst the shock and chaos of it all, I sat wondering if I was even allowed to grieve. Or, worse, if I was one of the reasons that he had died how he did.

My father suffered from mental health issues, especially panic disorder, which he very kindly passed on to me. There were times during my parents’ marriage that he thought he was having a heart attack, only to discover later at the hospital that it was an anxiety attack. He took care of his physical health, stayed active and ate healthily. His father had a heart attack at the age of thirty, so my dad always had to be extra cautious. 

I assumed he would be on this earth for a long time since his physical health was such a big priority. His mental health was not. He often refused therapy. He took his anger out on me, my mother, and my brother, along with the rest of our family. Everyone will always say he was a hell of a salesperson, but you rarely hear someone refer to him as a friend or confidant. 

Anger management, manipulation and narcissism were prevalent in my household around the time I turned ten and started thinking for myself. My father was often upset at how close my mother and I were – he would get jealous of the attention I was receiving. He would manipulate things I said and relay them to my mother, which is a unique type of betrayal. 

You look up to adults your whole life and take every word they say as truth, but then they lie right in front of you, and you’re helpless. You’re smaller and younger and have no power in a situation like that. No matter how much bigger or older I got, that dynamic never changed. I would plead helplessly with my mother to try and make her understand that I hadn’t done what my dad told her I did. Or that he had, in fact, said that I was the cause of their divorce.  

Before the age of ten, my dad and I were very close. I was more of a tomboy growing up, and he loved that. He taught me how to bait a hook and properly, to a curl rock, to unleash the loudest burp in the room. But he also tried to teach me how I should be as a girl; I should be ready to cook, clean, and be pretty for whichever man I married. Those small, passive comments were what made me start defending my autonomy once I understood that I was capable of doing so. My dad did not like to be questioned. 

In my teens, my parents separated after various incidents of cheating, gambling, and manipulative behaviour that became too much for even my very stoic mother to deal with. My dad moved away when I was sixteen. My mother, me, my brother, and my brother’s girlfriend all went to Mexico on our first family vacation without him. It was the freest I had ever felt. A weight had been lifted off my shoulders; the boogeyman had finally moved out from underneath my bed. 

I truly believe that some parents are just not meant to be parents – but it’s often too late once you find that out. My dad was very good with small children, capable of going to that infantile space in one’s brain that allows you to roll around on the floor and speak nonsense. But he was never good at guiding my brother and me once we got older. He could be a babysitter, but not a parent. But even if he wasn't meant to be a parent, he could have still been a friend, and that's where my complex grieving process begins. 

There are many reasons a parent can be absent from your life. They don't know how to deal with the overwhelming day-to-day of raising entire human beings; they're not ready in a certain capacity (whether it be financially, mentally, or otherwise); they have goals that don't align with parenthood that they didn't realise at the time; sometimes, they simply change as a person. It's so important to remember your parent is the only one to blame for their absence. 

It takes time to realise when you need to forgive and when you need to set boundaries. To recover from my own trauma, I had to set a boundary between my father and me once he moved out. We emailed every now and then, but I wished for him to not be in my life. Although it took a lot of back and forth between me, him and my mother, he finally stopped reaching out. 

When I told him that I didn’t want him to be in my life, I meant my current life. I am a new person every month, and I am constantly modifying my plans and goals. I love change. This was something that I often reiterated to my mother, who deeply longed for me to ‘get along’ with my father – this is not for the rest of my life, I told her. This is just until I get my life started and he realises how deeply he hurt me. 

I have hundreds of emails from him saying that he had changed, saying that he would do anything to see me again – but once I suggested therapy or learning to love himself first before being capable of loving his children fully and properly, he would ignore me. I eventually got frustrated and just stopped responding until about a year ago when I told him to respect my boundaries and leave me alone indefinitely. 

On that Monday evening that I learnt of my father’s suicide, I had to question whether I was experiencing shock or regret. Should I have just sucked it up, repressed my feelings, and spent time with my dad? Even just see him a couple of times a year, like my brother did, to maintain the peace? 

It’s been a week since he passed, and I’ve decided to not regret my choices. At the end of the day, I felt so much safer and more independent without my father’s voice in the back of my head telling me that I’m not good enough. Yes, of course I experienced shock. But what I experienced when I found out he committed suicide was anger. 

Having attempted suicide multiple times myself, I completely understand the mindset of a person in a time like that. He had been planning it for a while and visited both my mother and brother just days before he went through with his plan. But what he did was so cruel beyond belief because he wasn’t alone, he wasn’t destitute, and he wasn’t hopeless. 

He had been dating a wonderful woman named Teri for years; they were getting ready to move into a house they had bought together. She discovered him in her car. There was no note. I’ll never know what drove him to do it. I can’t blame myself: even though I may have been a factor in his sadness, it was ultimately his decision. I just hate that he had to do it at the age of sixty-six, leaving my brother with no father present at his wedding in July, leaving his girlfriend completely alone, and leaving my mother with over thirty-five years of memories and nobody to relay them to. 

I technically lost a father, but I mostly lost the potentiality of a father. I chose to not have him in my life so that I could focus on my own self-recovery, but I always thought that one day, when I was older with a family of my own, we would be in contact once again as friends, pen-pals, whatever name you’d like to call someone who I wanted to watch me grow into a person he always told me I wasn’t capable of becoming. Now that he made a decision he can never reverse, I will only have my mother to meet my future children, to walk me down the aisle at my future wedding, to be there when I need advice on things that I never learned when my father was absent in my youth. 

Losing an estranged parent is one of the most surreal experiences I’ve ever had. I’ve had to grieve both the present and the future, and I’ve also had to witness my family process this shock as unflinchingly as possible. His relationship with anyone was murky in different ways, so the stages of grief don’t apply here. They’re more like steps towards regaining normalcy.

If there’s anything that I’ve learned this past week, it’s that I need to keep in contact with my living family as much as possible. I need to learn how to do things on my own even more so. I need to keep my brother as close to me as possible. He and my mom are the only people who will ever fully understand the complexity of my grief – and how I can now never hurt the ones I love by leaving this world the same way that my dad did. I will fight to the bitter end, whether my brain wants me to or not. 

Rest in peace, dad. May you find calm wherever you are now. I’m sorry that we couldn’t start over.