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Funeral for a Father I Never Knew Essay

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"He looks just like me. Mom, I should have tried to see him." These were my words as I looked at my biological father lying in his coffin. His name was Larry James, and he lived in Utah. I hadn't seen him in years.

It was during the spring of last year. The evening was quiet, and I was trying to concentrate on my chemistry homework, which was becoming incredibly tedious. The sudden ring of the phone broke the calm. Nobody yelled downstairs, so I knew it wasn't for me. However, after a few minutes, my mom came downstairs with a serious, we-need-to-talk look on her face. At first I thought, "Oh great, what did I do now?" Then I realized she had been crying.

"Tanya, your Aunt Linda just called."

My Aunt Linda, I had never even heard …show more content…

I do remember the bar, though. The name of it was the El Ranchero. A friend of my mom and Larry owned it, plus it was the only bar where my dad could still drink even though he had an outstanding tab there.

Since I didn't remember that much of my biological father, I asked my mom to tell me about him. "What would you like to know?" she asked. I told her to tell me about what happened between them. I already knew that they married when she was seventeen, and I was born a year later. I also knew that Larry was an alcoholic and a drug addict. He also couldn't hold a steady job. I thought it was these facts that provoked my mom to divorce him. She said that these were some reason, but she also told me something else.

"Tanya, you don't know this and you probably don't remember it since you were about a year old, but your father owed drug money to a dealer. Well, when the dealer showed up to collect the money and your father wasn't there, the dealer threatened our lives. He held a gun up to my head and said he would kill you and me by that next week unless we came up with the money. That was when I knew it was over between your father and me."

My mom and I could have been killed? I was shocked but most of all angry. How could this man who was my father have let this happen? I concluded it must have been his addictions, but that still was not an excuse. In the end the debt was paid by my Grandpa and everything turned out fine with the dealer.

My mom still wasn't

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