I have forever felt that everyone around me is dying and I am next. First it was my mother. I was only three, but I can remember her hands. Long fingers with short nails and cracked, peeling cuticles. Small sores where she nervously picked calluses. Her hands were like mine. Then there was my dad. I was six, and I still couldn’t say how old he was. They have been mysterious to me for so long. They only live in the minds of those that aren’t willing to tell their stories. But I can tell. I can tell everything I remember and embellish the parts that I don’t. I feel like my mother’s twin, like I know her because, in some ways, I feel like I am her. That’s why it was so hard for my grandparents to raise me. I was stubborn and belligerent at times, impossible to reason with. And I look just like her. That’s the hardest part for my family. I have the same espresso brown hair with the same wily kinks and frizz. I have the same alabaster skin that burns too easily. If AIDS hadn’t killed her, melanoma might have. I have the same hips and thighs, the same strong arms. I don’t have her eyes. That was something that our maker reserved only for her, and I am jealous. My mother’s eyes were coal black and soft. I inherited something in between my father’s baby blues and momma’s doe-like gaze. That’s it. That’s all I can say about her, other than the stories I have heard from my Nana, and they are very few.

I have more memories of my daddy. There are some I would like to forget, like all the times I witnessed a virus destroy the strongest man I had ever known. There wasn’t a time when I knew my daddy that we wasn’t sick, but, as is the case with HIV/AIDS, it took years for his symptoms to grotesquely reveal themselves. I know very little about his background, about his childhood. I do know that it was difficult. He was the third child in a poor family from Oklahoma. His father was, from what I’ve heard, angry and usually drunk. My daddy, though he inherited the same relationship with booze that his father had, was loving. He loved me with tough love, and if he were here today I’d have to hug his neck for it. I remember his old blue pickup and the way he would play classic rock over the stereo, windows rolled down, aviator sunglasses always on. He taught me that police don’t like rock music and it’s always best to turn the radio down if you pass a cop. He made me feel like a rebel. It really was me and daddy against the world. And he had so much of the world to fight. He fought its addictions, its hatred and ignorance for the disease that tormented his body, but he was always strong. I watched him do pushups and sit-ups every night. I sometimes joined him. Then he’d either pick up his guitar and play for hours or sit down on the couch to watch the Discovery Channel with me, a bag of Lay’s, and a jar of Pace. My father was like a modern-day cowboy. But even cowboys get sick, and eventually I was too much to handle. I moved in with my Nana and Bubba when I was five, and my daddy moved in with his mom at the age of forty-two. He was still my daddy, though. Strong and loving. As he got sicker, he taught me about mental strength, how it’s more important to develop courage and will. He taught me that I would have to face hardships for the rest of my life with or without him. He taught me that I could pity myself or I could just accept whatever came at me with dignity. Don’t blame anyone else and forget about being angry over something that I can’t change. My daddy didn’t explain these lessons to me. He had taught me to be intuitive and to observe the world around me. I watched my daddy as he got sicker and learned all of these things from his actions and demeanor.

Six years isn’t long enough for a daughter to know her daddy, and three certainly isn’t enough for a daughter to know her mother. That’s why I write about them from time to time. That’s why they show up in my fiction, masquerading as characters within the plot. Someone has to tell their stories so that they can continue to live and be known, at least in small ways. And before anyone else reads this, I have to send up a little prayer asking that they please understand that no matter what I have to say about them, I love them, strengths, flaws, and all.