I’m Finally Ready to Grieve My Dad, 30 Years After His Death

The call came on a rainy April morning in 1996. My dad was dead. He was 57. The kidney cancer had won.

It was the day before my 21st birthday.

I skipped my university classes and drove from my Minneapolis apartment to the suburban mall where I’d recently worked. As a budding music critic, I always had the radio blasting. That day, I left it off. The silence carried me to my destination. I saw a former coworker. I wanted to tell him what had happened but stopped myself. I left without buying anything.

Back in my car, I buckled up, then froze as tears spilled down my cheeks. I took a deep breath and exhaled — relief coursing through me.

The funeral back in my hometown was a blur. I sat in a hard wooden pew next to my mom, now a widow at 51, and my older brother. Overwhelmed with sadness for them, I felt more for their loss than for mine.

In hindsight, part of that sadness was because I was never one of those people who loved him.

Author Amy Carlson Gustafson and her father posed together at her high school graduation in 1993.

Courtesy Amy Carlson Gustafson

My dad was a political science instructor at the local community college. For years after his death, people stopped me to say he’d been their favorite teacher, that he’d inspired them, helped them succeed. He taught a humanities program at the senior center, served on a hospice board, was a guardian ad litem, chair of the library board and a marathon runner. On paper, a pillar of the community.

At home, it was different. Until I was about 13, he was an angry alcoholic, verbally and mentally abusive. Most nights he passed out in his recliner with the TV blaring. I’d sprint from the kitchen to my room hoping he wouldn’t wake and see me.

After he sobered up, he turned into a dry drunk. When he wasn’t scrutinizing the way I looked or who my friends were, there were chunks of time he seemed to forget I existed, so I did the same. We could go weeks without speaking even as he drove me to school many mornings, the silence in that car as thick as the tension at home.

For nearly 30 years I carried a careful accounting of my dad’s failures and told anyone who asked that his death felt like a new lease on life. I still see it that way, but in recent years I’ve realized that parts of him have influenced me greatly. My hatred has waned, replaced by curiosity, empathy and even respect.

Last fall I interviewed CNN’s Anderson Cooper about his grief podcast, All There Is. He told me he’d only recently started grieving his father, who died when Cooper was 10. The idea of only beginning to grieve someone long after their passing had never occurred to me.