Jan. 10, 1998: The day I became an orphan.

On Tuesday, Jan. 6, 1998, my surviving parent was diagnosed with lung cancer. Dad was 62 and had been smoking cigarettes for more than 50 years. It finally caught up with him in the waning days of 1997, when dad started coughing up gobs of blood the consistency of pudding.

On Thursday morning, Jan. 8, dad was unable to breathe and was rushed by ambulance to the emergency room. I got the call at work and drove to the hospital with dread in my heart. Dad lay on his back, an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose, breathing in labored wheezes. I don't remember much of what we talked about on that hellish day, but I'll never forget dad saying, "I'm not coming out of here alive."

At 5:00 a.m. on Saturday the 10th, dad went into cardiac arrest. After a team of doctors and nurses spent a half-hour trying to revive him, they gave up. My father was dead and I was officially an orphan. (My mother had passed away four Januarys earlier, but that's a whole other set of heartaches.)

Cold-hearted as it may sound, we both got a break. By dying of cardiac arrest that cold winter morning, dad was spared several months of slow death by lung cancer--a fate suffered by his kid brother just three years before. And I was spared the hell-on-earth of watching it happen.

For various reasons--out of which I got more than 1,200 manuscript pages in the '90s--my father and I had grown apart. It was entirely my doing as I had begun to change in my early 20s. After a lifetime of pretending to be somebody I wasn't in the name of keeping peace in the family, I finally said "to hell with it" and started to be the person I really was--the only raving left-winger in my highly conservative working-class family.

Dad never understood or particularly approved of the Real Me, but I was his only offspring and he still loved me--even though I spent several years openly expressing my newfound anger and resentment toward the man for having given me a childhood rife with alcoholism and domestic violence. When dad left Connecticut for his Nevada retirement home in 1993, we had a tearful farewell and the tears were genuine on both sides.

In the spring of 1995, I visited my father in Nevada. His health was obviously deteriorating. As such, I decided to move out there to keep an eye on him. I didn't especially care for the desert, but I hadn't relocated for pleasure.

In February 1996, dad suffered a stroke. Though just a mild one, it still had a devastating effect on his ability to do things like speak clearly and write a check. For the next six months, I did my best to look after dad single-handedly and with no professional training in that sort of work. But dad saw the strain it was taking on me. Although he didn't want to leave Nevada, we subsequently relocated to Florida, where we had relatives who had offered to help us out if we moved there.

Turned out, though, neither dad nor I could stand Florida. So at my request, we returned to Connecticut in the spring of 1997. Dad, who believed himself to have Seasonal Affect Disorder, really didn't want to move back north, but agreed to do so for my sake. I think the man knew he didn't have long to live and wanted to do right by me. If so, he succeeded.

In the ten years since my father died, I've had what I'm guessing would be the same thoughts many adults have when they lose a parent. Should I have done more to bridge the gap I had single-handedly created between dad and me? If so, could I have done it without reverting to the severely compromised person I had been before my early-20s awakening? Thankfully, dad bore no overt resentment toward me over those things, particularly after his relocation to Nevada and the subsequent, unexpected, death of my mother. But I still can't help having those thoughts, even at this late date. They don't eat away at me or anything, but are still on my mind.

Having lost both parents, my grandfather and two uncles all during the month of January, I dread this month every damned year. It also doesn't help that it falls in the dead of winter, my least favorite season.

I can't believe it's been a whole decade since I lost dad. Where the hell has the time gone? And will I ever find the happiness and peace of mind that eluded my poor father for his 62 years of life? All I can do is wait and see.

Rest in peace, dad. Christ knows you earned it.