My father died from melanoma, the swift and merciless kind of cancer. I went away to Penn State in the summer of 1968 after which I began the fall semester. While I was away my father got sick. My mother didn't tell me about this because she wanted me to finish the semester. But cancer doesn't follow calendars. My father died on December 2, 1968.

When I went away to college I wasn't mature enough to be away from home; also, I wasn't in a good mental state to begin with. I was a troubled young woman. Then when my father died, I died too.

The months following were nightmarish. I walked around, appearing to be a normal person, but I was ill and the world was black. Then in the fall semester at the University of Pittsburgh, in 1969, I met Mark Hoffman, 20 years old, a sophomore. If I ever needed a friend and a comrade, somebody who was like me and read a lot including poetry, it was then and Mark took his place in my life. We decided to live together and then get married in the summer of 1971.

Mark provided "shelter from the storm," (thank you, Bob Dylan.) We took some classes together, walked all around Pittsburgh from Oakland through the Hill district to downtown and back, sometimes late at night and we talked about all the ideas we had about life and what we cared about. Mark gave me the books of Herman Hesse to read. He was a hard worker whose parents couldn't finance his education, and he worked long night shifts at McDonald's, then got up after just a few hours of sleep to go to his classes. We had our future all planned out.

A comrade and fellow poetry-reader does not always translate to being a suitable marriage partner. We did get married but the marriage fell apart after two years.

Mark put a giant Band-Aid on the enormous bruise in my soul. Yes I knew my father had died but thanks to Mark I had other things to distract me. Unfortunately that's all it was, a delightful and poignant distraction. When the marriage broke up I came back to Pittsburgh to live because I didn't really believe my father was actually dead. I was, according to the five stages of grief, in denial. My mind had not taken in the tragedy. A part of me believed I could come home and start all over again with my father still there, whole and intact.

So I am thanking my ex-husband on Father's Day. Strange? Not really, but only in part. It's my father I'm thinking about because with some good fortune and the intervention of one of the Golding cousins--Ellen Golding--after decades my father became real, not ghostly anymore. Ellen put me in touch with a man who knew the Goldings when my father and his brother Irvin were growing up, and this friend told me meaningful stories about my Dad, details that filled in the blank spaces. So I am not haunted anymore, not grieving anymore. My father has taken his place in my soul and is now a part of me.