My father has been dead for twenty-five years.
I have now spent considerably more of my life without him than I ever spent with him. I have been an adult without a father longer than I was a child with one.
I was eighteen when my father died. An age at which one is technically permitted to vote, enlist in the military, and purchase cigarettes, but is still largely incapable of understanding how the world works, and certainly lacking a fully developed frontal lobe. I was also an eighteen-year-old g...