I have almost everything that I think I’ll ever need on hand for my oldest son’s “father” (term used such as it is, for new people to my blog, because the last time he saw my son was when he was four months old and my son is now seventeen years old). I have the incident report for the accident that took his life, and I have a copy of the death certificate here at my home since I’m sure I’ll be needing that in place of our child’s custody order. There’s no one to share custody with if he’s gone. In our case, it wasn’t really sharing custody though… I was granted sole custody and he was denied access, and then that was made permanent in 2014 due to an escalation of his behavior that can only be described as severe, threatening to bring a gun into the child support office due to wage garnishment upon realizing that his wages had in fact been garnished. So the only thing that the now-defunct custody order proves is that his “parental rights”, such as they were, had not been terminated, but his presence on my child’s birth certificate proves that. He was permanently denied access to my child and could not reach out to contact my child for any reason, was permanently prohibited from contacting me (if he needed to make contact “about our child”, he was to contact a member of my family as he was not permitted to contact me), and had almost no decision-making authority over my child absent what I’m sure must normally come part and parcel with being on a child’s birth certificate and “having parental rights”. One thing in particular to note is that he has never had the ability to consent to my child’s medical care. This came from repeated threats to “drop my child from (his medical insurance)”.

I continue to be at peace with the fact that he is gone, because we will never be stalked or abused again. But I would not wish his manner of death on anyone, knowing that he was instantaneously killed when his bicycle was struck by a motor vehicle. I would also not wish his age of death on anyone knowing that he died at age thirty-seven, and I am now certifiably older than him. So many of his family members wanted him to “turn his shit around”, and although I can see why they would want that, for my son’s sake I had stopped hoping for it almost a year after I was ordered sole custody. He’d made it clear he wasn’t going to.