I’ve been an atheist since middle school, though not a snob about it since leaving college. The idea of an afterlife just always rang hollow to me. People are terrified of dying (I am too) and give themselves false hope of something better to come.
My daughter Daniella died ten years ago when she was eight years old. She’d always had medical problems, the most visible being that she was deaf and needed hearing aids. It was so hard on her mother and I, but I never regretted bringing her into our lives, and she was such a trooper about it; Daniella was fluent in sign language before I could sign a full sentence.
Her optimism wasn’t enough, nor was surgical intervention. Complications ended up taking her away from us, and my world ended then and there. I sank into the bottle from the unrelenting grief while my wife, desperate, turned to scam artists who claimed they could “contact the other side.” I knew they were full of BS, but I didn’t have to yell at her the way that I did. The marriage was over within a year.
I like to think that I’ve moved on. I remarried and am happily co-raising my stepchildren, giving them all the love I thought had been taken from me by Daniella’s passing. No harm will ever come to them if I can help it. Having grown up in a household where abuse was ignored, I was always determined to protect my children from it.
Come the anniversary of my daughter’s death, though, I grow somber and find myself at the bar more frequently. Sometimes I end the night in tears and my wife needs to come pick me up as I sob about how much I want to see Daniella one more time. Magnificent woman that she is, my wife has never made me feel guilty about losing control of myself like that.
After yesterday, I’m not sure if I can ask her to put up with my anymore. I haven’t eaten or slept and certainly haven’t gone back to work. I don’t know what I’m going to do but it’s probably going to ruin my life.
Though the actual anniversary is next week, I was bitter and called it early at work. My job was done for the day, and if I started drinking ASAP, I could be home and in bed at a reasonable hour, then back at work in the morning. There wasn’t a lot of parking, so I had to walk a bit to get to the bar.
While waiting at a crosswalk, I noticed a little white girl across the street staring at me. She was ten or eleven and waiting while her mother spoke to a police officer. Since she was staring, I politely smiled and waved.
She smiled and waved back, then signed something at me. My ASL is rusty after so many years of minimal use, and I was so caught up in the surprise that she knew it at all that it took me a moment to process what I’d read. When I did, my blood ran cold, but the child had already been pulled out of sight by her mother.
“Hi Daddy, I miss you. I don’t like my new parents as much. They hit me when they get angry.”