When Daddy Died

Jason Remington was not my father, but he was my Dad

I was told when I was eight years old that Daddy wasn’t my “real” Daddy.

Bullshit.

To this day I still don’t know with any certainty who my “real” father was and I don’t care. The only father I ever knew was Jason Elwood Remington, Jr. and he was my Daddy.

Families have stories.

Some may be true and others are what the tellers want to be true. Was Jason a close friend to the man my mother married when she was 20 after her true love died in a motorcycle accident? Did my mother really not conceive any children for the first five years of that marriage only to have it end ugly when I was a year old?

She did marry Jason Remington. I was not invited to the wedding, a small affair with no bride in white or tossed bouquets. She went on to bear Jason three more daughters. He never got over not having a son.

My mother was beautiful. Like, movie-star beautiful.

And Jason, well, you can see for yourself that he was kind of a smallish man, not great looking and, worse, he couldn’t enlist in World War II because of some foot defect. He was never comfortable in his home, in his marriage, in his manhood, in his skin. Before we moved to Ohio under mysterious circumstances, Jason was the only full-time police officer in the little town we lived in and our family car was outfitted with a police radio and the “gumball” red lights on the roof.

My mother’s father insisted on calling him Barney Fife (youngsters, go to YouTube and watch one episode of The Andy Griffith Show; we’ll wait). To the end of my grandfather’s life, he always called Daddy Barney. Worse, everyone else picked it up and that’s what Jason was called at every family gathering.

Some short, not-so-attractive men could roll with that shit. They could accept that a gorgeous woman like my mother could genuinely love them for who they were. Not Jason. He doubted himself and doubted her. There were horrible drunken fights.

She stayed for the children

And the day after my youngest sister graduated from high school, my mother moved out of our house and in with her long-time “friend”, Max. She had stayed with Daddy all those miserable years “for the girls”.

If Jason had been morose and unsure of himself before, he was now wrecked. He had only one certainty in life: women were bitches and not to be trusted. This made it tough for my next-youngest sister who moved back to the family home with her own husband and daughter to “take care of Daddy.”

Not me

I had fled small-town Ohio years before and had been wrecking my own life in Cleveland when Mom left Daddy. I had enough drama of my own going down, thanks, and didn’t pay much attention to what I’d left behind.

In time Daddy left the family home on Wooster Street and went to live in a trailer park outside of town. He’d been a Ford mechanic most of his working life, but the last five or ten years before retirement he was working as an engineer and troubleshooter for oil companies in the Middle East. Now he was just a worn-out old guy who drank too much and lived in a trailer.

Amends

When he was diagnosed with liver cancer in 2002, I was living in New York City and was no longer actively wrecking my life. I got the call from one of the sisters that he’d been diagnosed and had told the doctors he was going home, that he wasn’t interested in any treatment.

I flew home and had the chance to thank my Daddy.

He didn’t want to have anything to do with Mom and tolerated the sisters but had made up his mind. Anyone who wanted to argue with him or try to get him to see “reason” was welcome to leave.

I do remember leaning against him in the hallway near the bathroom and telling him I felt like shit for that time when I was 14 and loudly accused him of treating me like a stepchild (which he never did, btw). I think we cried. I thanked him for being my Daddy. I told him that I learned how to work hard from him.

Two weeks and I was back

The call came two weeks later while I was in Arlington, Virginia with my then-boyfriend. Daddy had died.

Rich drove me to Dulles airport where security decided that my backpack looked like it needed searching. I was working as a pro-domme at the time and had the tools of my trade in that bag. Whatever stress or anxiety I may have been experiencing up to that point went right out the window. There are few things more fun in life than watching security personnel timidly handling butt plugs, dildoes, nipple clamps, and assorted floggers.

Saying goodbye

There were a lot of people at that funeral. Daddy probably never realized he had so many really good friends; people who cared for him but couldn’t keep fighting to stay in that stubborn pissed-off man’s life.

My sisters told me that he was delirious in his last days, mistaking my youngest sister and her baby for Mom and her. Yes, yes they told him, yes, we had many wonderful years together. Yes, I loved you. Yes, I love you. Yes, the baby does look like you right down to the dimple in her chin. Yes, we’ll go on that trip as soon as you’re better.

When the lawyers reached me a month later it was to say that his estate had been divided equally between the four of us.

Daddy is the man who stays

As is clear from the story below about family secrets, I’ll never know for sure who my biological father was and I am ok with that. I was raised by a proud, strong, hard-working man who’d grown up not having shoes in the summertime during the Great Depression and he stayed in that house with the woman who he never was sure loved him and he raised four strong, hard-working women.

I’m glad I got to say thank you to my Daddy but I sure miss him.

© Remington Write 2019. All Rights Reserved.

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