Every year between the start of the New Year and the middle of March, I am pulled into a vortex—or at times a void—of remembering the passing of my late father in February 2010. I was 16 years old, dreaming of standardize-testing my way out of Florida, and coming into the growing realization that not everyone had a father that drank alcohol the way mine did. In fact, for much of my early life, I’m unsure I understood it could be a problem to drink—that it wasn’t something one did alone, that one should limit the amount they consumed—such that when I made it to college, I drank with ignorant aplomb, with almost no rest between drinks, blacking out regularly and not knowing it wasn’t necessarily supposed to be like this. Alcohol was a constant fixture in my father’s life, the omnipresent background character of my childhood, and a phantom albatross around the neck of my adulthood.

As such—and as is the case, I’m sure, with many people who know grief—my memory of my father is quite complicated. He was complicated. At his best, he was caring and jubilant, someone who nurtured and provided for those he loved. He was the person who walks into your local cafe and knows all the regulars; the friend who cooks elaborate meals and plays card games into the night; the dad who dresses up in drag for a middle school cabaret performance because their daughter is really into Hairspray. In his shadow, there was pain, escape, criticism, shame. That is to say: he was human; he could be a real asshole. But he wanted to be your angel. The result was a kaleidoscopic sense of self that was frequently fluctuating but so beautiful when it caught the light.

I think he shied away from embracing the darker aspects of himself, though I believe he was fully aware they were there and aware of how he pushed that awareness away. I understand why he did this. I think this is a thing most humans do. We don’t want to see the ways in which we are not who we tell ourselves we are. Perhaps there is fear that if one acknowledges their own darkness, power is being given over to said darkness. But really, the things that have the power to consume us—like addiction, like illusion, like shadow—are best controlled when they are kept under a watchful eye. If the alcoholic pretends that this one drink won’t lead to the next, they have already surrendered themself over to flow of drinks that follow.

What stings and what lingers is I can never have these conversations with him; can never look him in the eyes and say, “I’ve spent my whole life learning what it means to understand you.” Instead I speak to his ghost and the candle flame. I keep an open seat next to me at the movie theater. I carry his broken 007 roulette watch in my pencil pouch. I imagine if he never went braindead when being transported out of the ICU, what it would have meant for him to recover. My favorite way to imagine him is during a group share in an AA meeting. I can see him now with his styrofoam cup of coffee, chewing on Eclipse gum to satiate his nicotine cravings, and opening the room up with laughter. He would have belonged there. Anyone who knew him knew he always had something to say.