How to Mourn a Sexually Abusive Father

I'd wanted him dead for years, but that didn't stop me from grieving.

Illustrations by Leonardo Santamaria | Edited by Lilly Dancyger

My father was everything wrong with my life since my life began. There was a stiff relief when I got the news of his passing, a year in the making thanks to cancer and probably a thousand-­pound conscience.

Yet there I was that afternoon at his wake, in tears, fainting before him in his coffin.

Maybe it was the pressure of being in too many emotional states at once that did it; standing on the knife’s edge of a daughter’s morality while feeling an imp­like glee at his death. My sister from his previous marriage had been kneeling at the casket, and I’d tried to support her and play the calmer of the two of us. She was crying and shouting at him, mired in her own grief, for she had suffered much of the same abuse from him in her own childhood. I looked at our father’s still face and the tiny smile of a mortician’s design on his lips. I got scared. There’s always been a part of me that worries that no matter where I am, no matt…