An Ode to Moral Goodness

I will never have closure.

Not because I refuse to heal. Because there is no ending where the people who caused the damage finally understand it.

My father chose abandonment.

That word matters.

He did not lose me. He was not prevented from knowing me. He did not spend years searching for some way back. He knew I existed.

And he chose a life that did not include me.

Abandonment was not one decision. It was a decision he renewed for years. Every birthday. Every Christmas. Every ordinary Tuesday when he could have wondered where his son was, picked up a phone, written a letter, or simply tried.

He did not.

People can attach whatever explanation they want to that. Fear. Shame. Immaturity. Selfishness. Avoidance. None of those explanations changes the outcome.

He had a son.

He chose not to be his father.

And a child does not understand adult explanations anyway. A child understands something much simpler:

My father knows I exist, and I am still not worth coming for.

That is the inheritance he left me. Not intentionally, perhaps.

But completely.

Even later, when he had the opportunity to look honestly at what his absence had done, he would not. Because acknowledging the damage would have required acknowledging the choice.

Then he died.

So there will never be a conversation where he finally admits it. No apology. No reckoning. No moment where he says, I knew you were there. You deserved a father. I chose myself instead.

People tell me he was a good man.

Maybe he was.

But I have become increasingly unwilling to accept that sentence without examining what it actually means.

Maybe he was funny. Maybe he was generous. Maybe he was loyal to friends. Maybe he showed up when other people needed him.

Fine.

But if goodness cannot survive the obligation to your own child, I am not sure what kind of goodness we are defending.

I am not saying he was evil.

I am saying I am no longer willing to protect his reputation from the consequences of his choices.

My mother is different.

She did not choose schizophrenia.

Mental illness took so much of her that I do not really remember losing a mother.

I remember never having one.

When I reach back into childhood, I do not find some stable woman who later disappeared beneath illness. I see a person in a dirty bathrobe, trapped inside a delusion so complete that the rest of us barely existed inside it.

That was normal. That was home. That was Mom.

Except she was never really a mother in the way a child needs one.

There was no dependable version of her waiting behind the illness. No steady hand. No emotional safety. No person consistently capable of seeing what was happening to her children because her own reality swallowed nearly everything around her.

Even now, she barely knows my children's names, their birthdays, where they go to college, or the people they are building their lives with.

Her grandchildren.

My sons.

She cannot hold their names inside the world she lives in.

That is not an accusation. It is simply the truth.

And the truth is harsh enough.

I can understand schizophrenia. I can understand delusion. I can understand that much of what happened was never chosen.

But understanding does not give me a mother.

Compassion does not erase neglect. A diagnosis does not create safety. Mental illness can explain why a child was harmed without making the harm disappear.

Then come the words people offer because they believe goodness somehow settles the account.

Your father was a good person.

Your mother was a good person.

Maybe.

But what exactly am I supposed to do with that?

Am I supposed to take someone else's pleasant memory and lay it over my childhood until mine becomes less inconvenient? Am I supposed to hear that my father was kind to someone else and feel better that he could not be bothered to know his own son? Am I supposed to hear that my mother once made someone laugh and somehow forget that her illness consumed our home?

No.

I do not need to destroy anyone else's memories.

But I will not let those memories be used to sanitize mine.

Because every time I tell the truth about what happened and someone immediately rushes to defend the goodness of the adult, something old happens again.

The adult gets protected.

The child becomes the problem.

Again.

Maybe that is what bothers me most about the phrase good person.

It can become moral anesthesia.

A way to soften ugly truths. A way to preserve someone's reputation without having to look directly at who paid for it.

My brother may have known a good father.

I believe him.

I knew a man who chose not to be mine.

Both can be true.

But those truths are not morally equal simply because they belong to the same man.

His goodness toward someone else does not erase his abandonment of me.

My mother may have goodness inside her. Her illness still made her incapable of being the mother I needed.

I do not need either of them to be monsters.

That would actually make this easier.

Monsters are simple.

People are not.

People can be loved and still cause enormous damage. They can be remembered warmly by one person and painfully by another. They can do good things and still make choices that should permanently complicate the word good.

That is where I live now.

I no longer need to decide whether my parents were good people. I am not sure the question even matters.

What matters is what happened.

My father knew I existed and chose absence.

My mother was so consumed by mental illness that she was never truly available as a mother.

Those are the facts.

There will be no reconciliation. No apology that balances the books. No final conversation where everything suddenly becomes understandable.

My father is dead.

My mother remains trapped inside a reality I cannot reach.

The only thing left to bury is the fantasy that someday either of them might become what I needed.

The father who comes back.

The mother who wakes up, sees me clearly, and knows my children's names.

Those people do not exist.

Maybe they never did.

That is not bitterness. That is not cruelty.

That is the end of pretending.

And I will not abandon myself again just to preserve someone else's definition of a good person.

Prefer a copy? Download the PDF.