Dying

So my father is dying. So says my half brother, via a facebook message I received tonight on my cell phone. He's gone in to hospice care and "they" don"t think he has much time left. I', not entirely certain who "they" are, or what exactly it is that he's dying from. My father has never met me, or to be fair, I have never met him. I guess he saw me a lot when I was a baby, but by the time I was a year old he was gone, for good. He moved away with his wife, his new son, and the baby girl she was carrying. I never got a card, a letter, even a postcard to say," hey how are you?" When I was about 25 years old I looked up my brother and found him and by extension my father. The reunion was not exactly heart warming. We talked a few times and I realized why his absence from my life up to that point was not a tragedy after all. After that my interest in the subject essentially vanished. I friended my brother on fb and eventually my sister as well, and that was that. Until tonight.

A friend told me that dying does not change the effects of how you lived, and that's a valid point, but we are all victims of our lives. The decisions we make, that are made for us, right or wrong. I want to tell him that I'm not angry, I don't hate him for walking away, and seemingly never looking back. That I own my life and that his absence, while obviously a major influence, is not a tragedy that I still mourn. I want to see him, once in my life, but that's not even a possibility. I can't afford a plane ticket to Maine, hell I can't afford a ticket to Pittsburgh.