My father passed away sometime last night.

It's funny--I've spent the past couple of years working on remembering the positive things about my childhood instead of the negative ones, but I had not thought to remember anything good about my father.

So here is something:

I don't remember when it was, but at some point, when I must have been in my teens, my father and I went to Fallingwater, about two hours away from Pittsburgh. I wonder if the only reason I even remember this is the photos that I have of it--he wore a bright pink Hawaiian shirt and a baseball cap.

My father had esophageal cancer. A little over a year ago, I accompanied him to a lot of his treatments at the VA hospital in DC and Martinsburg, WV. They were able to remove the cancer, but it eventually spread into his liver and, as I said, he died last night.

I did not have much of a relationship with my father over the years.

Now that my relationship with my mother is no longer so fragmented, I can think of a vast sea of actions and moments that point to the fact that she cared very much about me and did the best she could, despite both of our defects. The best I can come up with for my father is my hazy memory of our trip to Fallingwater. I remember being surprised at how ugly the faded orange furnishings were after having baked in the sun for years and years of nobody living there.

I traveled back to the US at the end of June, in order to sell our car and visit with my father before he died. We spent maybe three hours together at a restaurant in Western Maryland. He had become...small.

Perhaps I am too practical, but it seems to me that if I was only going to be able to make one trip down to Maryland, visiting my father while he was still alive did him a whole heck of a lot more good personally than going to his funeral. This, and all of the other decisions I made concerning him in the past year and change, are now mine alone to remember and negotiate.