I found my fathers confession letter 9 years after his death. I am in tears.
My father passed away 9 years ago due to a combination of health complications. I didn’t keep much of his things after I cleaned out his apartment.
The only thing I took was a fire-safe lockbox. I was afraid to open it because of what I might find for my dads apartment was filled with a lot of things that I wasn’t expecting.
Yesterday while organizing my closet I couldn’t stop staring at the box and for the first time I opened it. At the top were a bunch of expired credit cards and bank statements.
At the very bottom was a Manila envelope. I opened it up and it contained a picture of a toddler that looked like me but wasn’t and a two page letter in his handwriting.
The first page was more or less information about his life that I already knew. The second page is what got me.
The boy in the picture was my older brother that I never knew about. In the letter he confessed to me that he and the mother had a baby boy.
My older brother and his mother according to the letter died a year after that picture was taken in a car accident.
He never mentally recovered or truly grieved. He met my mom a year and a half after my brother’s death and they got married within the next year.
I understand now why my dad had such a hard time showing me affection for so long and why he fell into the bad habits he had helped shorten his life.
He was a man in pain not only from his traumatic childhood (that’s a whole other post) but losing your first born son. I haven’t cried this much in years it brought out the suppressed tears and pain I have felt for losing him years ago.
How I wished he had told me all of this while he was living and how I could’ve helped if possible. Despite it all I love my dad, I miss him, and I finally have some clarity and closure why he was the way he was. I just wanted to get this off my chest.