This one was not easy. My dad died in early 2022 & I pretty much threw myself into making a bunch of cat comics as an excuse to have a huge new project to occupy my time so I wouldn’t be bogged down in sadness. But I knew I had to address it somehow, this is a damn autobiographical comic series, kinda. How could I avoid it?
I don’t mean to paint the picture of my dad being a good dad. Some of what’s hard about his death is the amount of unresolved stuff, the distance between us. It all sounds very stereotypical for a man & his dad to have issues. It makes no sense to go into all the trauma here in a little blurb beneath a comic. But this was where I was emotionally when I wrote this comic. Trying to see the good in a human despite the direct harm they caused me due to abuse, neglect, & dishonesty. Clearly I’m still processing this. It takes time.
Anyhow, the death of a parent kind of makes a person fatalistic for a while. I never felt more mortal than I did in 2022. Maybe that time in 2021 when some guy passing me on the sidewalk said he was going to shoot me “in the fucking face” & motioned to pull out a gun & extended it to the spot right between my eyes. But I’m approaching middle age, & these cats are about to turn 10, so yeah I got a little mopey this year about the idea of them not being around.
But I try to remember that all we have is now. The present moment. It helps me to experience it.
