I do one thing now, with the fortune I once used to insulate myself from people like the man my father became.
I fund and personally work with programs that help the homeless recover their identities — the specific, invisible population of people who’ve lost their names, their papers, their memories, their connection to the families still searching for them. Because my father was one of them for twenty years, findable the whole time, if anyone had looked closely enough to see a human being instead of a mess to step around.
I look now. At every one of them. Because any one of them could be someone’s father, and I know, better than almost anyone alive, what it means to find one.
My husband ordered me to bathe a homeless man I was too arrogant to see as human.
I put on gloves in disgust.
And I washed away twenty years of grime and found my father underneath—
the man I’d been told would never come home,
alive, in my own house, called a mess by his own daughter,
an hour before she fell to her knees and called him Dad.
I got my father back.
Because my husband saw a person where I saw a problem.
And I will spend the rest of my life looking closely enough to see the birthmark—
the humanity—
under everyone the world has decided to forget.
His name was not Lucas.
His name was the one only he ever called me by, given back:
my father.
