Childhood Memories

To discuss the topic of how cancer has touched my life is an emotional one to write about.  I immediately think of how it is affecting me in one way or the other when implementing how I was touched.  It does not create a positive connotation due to the nature of the topic.  I have not suffered from the illness myself but I did lose my father as a result of it.  I was very young at the time of his passing and do not have any recollections or memories of the man he was.  When I was growing up, I never really thought about that experience with much sadness for the most part.  My perspective, at that time, was not that I lost my father.  It was that I solely did not have one.  There was my mother and my siblings.  The rare moments when I had to face that reality were very complex however.  In elementary school, we would have breakfast with our parents once a year, alternating the genders.  Every other year I had to explain to a teacher that my father was not alive.  The response was usually a sympathetic one of “I am sorry to hear that”.   It created a single moment of tremendous sorrow with the confirmation that it was bad to have had that happen to me.  It let me know that there was an aspect of my life missing.  There was something that many others had but I could not have for myself.  Then I would have a classmate volunteer that I could accompany them and their dad to the event.  The first time this happened, I believe I cried but every time after that just became much easier to deal with.  As I matured, I started to think of how my life would be different if my father were living.  I would see images on television and in the neighborhood but there was nothing that I would directly try to emulate.  I was not searching merely for the presence of a father figure but I wanted to know how my circumstances would actually be changed?  The troubling question was whether the effect of my father being alive would have been positive or negative.  The presence of my father would create a two income household where my mother would not be working the majority of the day.  There would be a contrast in parenting techniques.  I would have an adult male to seemingly grow in the image of.  I may have had a younger sibling.  There may have been an environment of discipline enforced that produced good study habits and improved academic performance.  All of this could be possible or it could be worse.  What if he were to be abusive?  What if he caused undue stress that changed the direction of my life?  What if he were to pass at a later time that would have a more dramatic effect on me than when I was younger?  I think of these questions but I never truly answer them.  I just allow them to exist in my imagination.  The proverbial cancer of curiosity has a cost of a toll of its own.  The questions are left without being answered predominantly because I know further research into those inquiries would change the person I am today.  And again I do not really know if that would be for the better or the worse.