Quick backstory: He died Nov. 14.

I keep trying to feel something – anything – and yet my mind tends to wander to my ex-wife for that.

I very vaguely remember times where we’d have fun, as with me riding on his shoulders, but the final year Oma came for Christmas, all of that was gone.

A friend and I had split a beer several months back (I think we were 11) when my parents went out for the night and got us pizza.

As 11-year-olds are, we stupidly did not dispose of the evidence. My parents being reasonable people, the punishment was “don’t ever do this again.”

So it is against this backdrop that I’m sitting in my room, and my dad bursts in, furious. In my face like he’d never been before, and I was frozen in shock and confusion. I’d not done anything.

Over the course of the next half hour, the picture becomes clear: Oma had opened a beer thinking it was a V8.

What I never got was an apology. He knew damn fucking well that he’d falsely accused me and scared me, but apologizing was apparently too much.

There were nearly 35 years for that apology. It just didn’t happen.