The Shit That Built Me… and Broke Me (0-4)

Age 0–4: The First Loss

Trauma is a weird thing.

Sometimes it shows up as a moment you remember in perfect detail—the smell, the sounds, the exact words someone said. Other times it’s the opposite. It’s just a blank space in your memory where something big happened but your brain never really recorded it.

My story starts somewhere in that second category.

My father died when I was four years old in a drunk driving incident. Alcohol was a big part of his life. For a long time, especially when I was younger, I simplified that into something easier for my brain to process.

I used to think he was just a fuck-up.

Kids do that. We take complicated adult problems and boil them down into simple labels.

But the older I’ve gotten, the more life I’ve lived, and the more I’ve learned about addiction, the more I’ve started to see it differently. My dad was a construction worker. At some point early in my life he got injured on the job. Anyone who has worked around construction or blue-collar jobs knows how that story often goes—pain, pressure to keep working, and not a lot of healthy ways to deal with it.

Now, as an adult who understands addiction a lot better than I did as a kid, I look back and wonder if he was just trying to self-medicate the only way he knew how.

None of that excuses the outcome.

But it does change how I understand him.

The truth is, my memories of my father are vague. Fuzzy. Like snapshots that sat in the sun too long and started to fade. I don’t have clear conversations stored away in my head or vivid scenes of us doing things together.

Most of what I know about him now is what people have told me.

I was told he’s the one who broke me from the bottle.

He’s the one who potty trained me.

Those little details hit differently as an adult. They’re small things, but they’re the kind of things that tell you someone was there in the day-to-day moments of raising a kid. The messy parts. The unglamorous parts. The parts that actually mean something.

I’ve also been told something else my entire life.

That he loved me deeply.

And I believe that.

But if I’m being honest, I don’t actually know how I reacted when he died. I was four years old. At that age you don’t understand death. You don’t understand permanence. You don’t grasp the idea that someone is gone forever.

I imagine I probably just knew two things.

My dad wasn’t there anymore.And everyone around me was really, really sad.

Kids don’t process grief the same way adults do. Adults think about loss and finality. Kids mostly notice the shift in the room—the mood, the tension, the quiet that suddenly shows up in places it wasn’t before.

Something is different.

You just don’t know why.

There’s a concept in psychology called the Adverse Childhood Experiences score, usually shortened to an ACE score. It’s a research tool that looks at different types of trauma during childhood—things like abuse, addiction in the household, domestic violence, and losing a parent—and assigns a number based on how many of those experiences happened before adulthood.

The higher the number, the more research shows your risk goes up later in life for things like depression, addiction, chronic health problems, and a long list of other struggles.

Losing a parent as a child counts as one of those points.

So before I was even old enough to start kindergarten, before I understood the world in any meaningful way, my score had already started.

It’s strange thinking about that now.

You know those social media posts that float around sometimes? The ones that ask: “If you could bring one person back from the afterlife for a day, who would it be?”

For years I’ve always said I wouldn’t bring anyone back.

But sitting here writing this, I realize that’s probably not true.

If I could bring someone back—even just for a day—it would be my father.

Not to fix anything.

Not to ask him why things happened the way they did.

I think I’d just want the chance to actually know him.

To form one real memory.

Just one.