We lost my dad on Friday. I won’t go into details about the last few months; I did that here. It has sucked and this will haunt me for a long time.

Too many photos of him from the last few years feature him in a hospital bed or wheelchair, and that’s not how I want to remember him. Instead, here’s a photo of him and his dog Tootsie (left) tolerating our boy Ditko on Christmas of last year.

I’m very glad the last thing he heard me say was “I love you.” For whatever reason¹probably toxic masculinity, tbh, we didn’t tell each other that with any kind of regularity in the first 40-odd years of my life.