|  We all have a father whether we know him or not. I knew mine as a friend and a parent. My story begins with the end of a twenty year marriage between my biological parents, and ends in terrible suffering and death. All too commomly, a parent or loved one has a crutch, or several that they hold onto in order to stay sane. My mother, as I was experiencing my youth was a hard working floor nurse at Providence Medical Hospital. She worked double shifts and raised myself and my brother when she could. She aspired to be the best mother ever, while growing a garden that produced food during the summer, helped me raise animals, chopped firewood on her days off and took time off from work to go on historical site road/camping trips during the summer. My father was a hard working sheet metal worker with the union, and tried to be the best father he knew possible. He encouraged education, history, math, science and english, as well as common sense. He was our teacher in the shop, under cars, working with wood and metal, and he encouraged my creativity with crafts and art. His downfall was that he was incapable of love - and it made life very confusing.
From a young age, he was beaten for small, insignificant things and developed sociopathy by his teens and utilized it well. From age 17 on, he became the lifestyle of drugs, sex, and rock 'n' roll. He lived it up until his very moment of passing. His ailments seemed endless and his regrets many as he expressed them all too frequently by the time of him leaving. He didn't quite make it to my high school graduation - he missed it by four months.
After the divorce, I became the counselor, listener and mediator between my parents. It was an emotionally wrenching responsibility for a 14 year old, but I wouldn't take it back for the world, as the lessons I learned from the experience are truly priceless.
Between 1999 and 2003, he sent letters to me and I kept and rewrote them word for word in a collected works.
"Collection of Douglas Howard Brooks' Letters"
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