Today would be my father's 83 birthday. (Not a happy post. Trigger alert.) [View all]

[Not Heidi]

Dennis died at 69, on Jan. 10, 2008, when he crashed his ultralight in the hills of Riverside Co., CA. We - my sisters and I - believe he took his life intentionally. I believe he was thinking of my sisters and me as he prepared to die. When I was 23, as I served my first stint in a psychiatric hospital, he told me he felt desperately guilty at the turn our lives took when he left our mother with three little girls after seven years of marriage. Our mother, Jeannie, took her life at age 33, on Dec. 10, 1974, when I was 11.

Although I've forgiven him, I don't have nor do I need any warm and fuzzy memories of my father. My mother gets a pass, as she was tormented by things beyond her control. She spent time in a mental hospital, three separate stays. She was as desperately hurt as anyone I've known, including myself. I've had to forgive a few people besides my father. She was the easiest to forgive.

Neither of my parents had any business having children. I've always believed that neither of them wanted children, but that they had them because that's what you did in the '50s & early '60s.* You married and had children. It was practically law.

I have my sisters. They are my life. Never were any sisters closer.

* If she'd been capable, my mother would've dug the late '60s. By '74, she just couldn't stand it anymore.

TL;DR: tormented, hurtful parents, both dead by suicide - a remembrance