Dad.

On this the 200th post of this blog, I was going to publish something I had started on the nature of friendship. Instead, I am dedicating it to the memory of my father. Regular readers may remember that my dad died of AIDS, contracting it a during blood transfusion while undergoing cardiac bypass surgery in 1984. He was in that first group of people to get infected back then from transfusions, and four years later, on Valentine's Day in 1988 he would die of complications from HIV. The horror show that was his illness, which wasn't picked up until late into the course of it, impacted me (in addition to my family) in ways that still resonate to this day.

The anger that I carried with me festered for a great long time, and was only truly exorcised but a few years ago. Still, there are certain things that still make me shudder; His never living long enough to see me act, to succeed in my former profession, to become a writer, and I think most certainly where my brother is concerned, to see the birth of my niece, his first and only grandchild. At the same time, I'm glad that he wasn't there to see what I went through during my illness and subsequent transplant, but then again, he would have been there to support my mom.

As a result, Valentine's Day is a bittersweet one for me. Mrs. Nighttime and I always celebrate the day before, as the day itself can be too difficult on some years. It is also, for some reason, the only part of my Judaism that I stick to, lighting a yahrzheit lamp on the anniversary of his death as well as on Yom Kippur.

This year I will be on stage in the show that I'm currently in, imagining that he is in the audience. I would like to think he would have been proud of my accomplishments over the years. We never saw eye-to-eye on a lot of things, though towards the end, he was getting a better understanding of why I loved being a paramedic.

Cheers Dad.