I haven’t posted here in a long time, I realize this, and I’m still grappling with the new administration and the changes that have transpired since January. I’m horrified by some of the things that have happened, including the gutting of USAID. DOGE is another matter. Apparently, all our private data is being given to Palantir, so that is another horror show going on behind the scenes. I’ve known about Palantir for some time now. (If you don’t know about it, google it.) At any rate, I expected Trump to cancel Pride Month in a tweet, and oddly enough, he hasn’t. Maybe he’s saving that for next year. Or… I guess the month is still young.

Still, it’s the first day of June and it’s Pride Month. Pride Month in S.F. used to give me a buoyant feeling. There was the Frameline Film Festival at the Castro Theatre. That started mid-month and went on for ten days, culminating in the closing night movie, which was always the same day as the gay pride parade, if I recall. I attended quite a few dyke marches as well. The Castro is closed now for renovation, symbolically, and was bought by Another Planet Entertainment, who are firmly determined to turn it into a moneymaker with concerts and moveable seating. But I wonder if it ever will be.

Grappling with change is difficult. Although I remember June as being pleasant and relaxed growing up in Ireland—with school finally over for the year, I could kick back and watch old movies on daytime TV!—it wasn’t always the case. When I was five, my father suddenly left us in the early morning while I was still dozing. It was the third week of June, 1972. He packed his bags and left my mother a note in his loopy black handwriting. I still have the note somewhere. Diane, it starts, I am leaving you. He took a charter plane back to the East Coast of the U.S. and drove cross-country to California, where his parents lived. Much later I learned we would have lost our old car as well, had it been up to him, since he drove it to the airport that day and dumped it. I never dared to raise this with him. There were so many things I didn’t dare to raise, because I was afraid of what he would say. And then I would have to remember it.

The young woman who became my stepmother fixed the situation by cycling to our flat from the airport and leaving my mother a note through the door slot, anonymous of course. It occurs to me now that she could just have driven the car back, but presumably she didn’t have an Irish license and was afraid to, or maybe she thought my mother would spot her and assume my father was returning! Unaware of these dramatics, unaware that my father had left us for someone else, I had to get used to my mother’s boyfriend suddenly moving in with us. But that wasn’t a hard transition because I was a very adaptable child. I accepted it. No questions asked! At the age of five, you don’t question your parents’ decisions. Later in the summer, my father did return briefly, and that visit caused me a great deal of turmoil, much of it hidden.

This will be the first June without my father, who died last September at the age of eighty. I think he always thought about the way he left his first marriage; I think it stayed on his mind. But for me, that betrayal was too easily put aside. My childhood was filled with many challenges, and I wanted to see my father as “the easy parent.” It was certainly easy for him to maintain a loving relationship from a great distance, but that became normal as time went on. Soon I was flying to the U.S. as an unaccompanied minor each summer, wearing a badge that said UM. Nothing bad ever happened to me on the planes except I would vomit dutifully into the sick bag for a few years. Then my stomach settled. There would be a cheery welcome at the other side. Then things became more complicated and decidedly less fun, but how could I break the routine?

June is the anniversary of my mother’s death from breast cancer too, at age 57, thirty years after my father left practically to the day. He commented on it, seemed stunned. My mother had long gotten over his abandonment of her, but as she was dying she was still ruminating on her choices, on the breakup of her second marriage. She had lost my stepfather to a younger woman a few years before. There had been no divorce. There was no will. She left it all up to my stepfather to sort, and he did, being a lawyer. The first year of loss was rough. I was incredibly emotional. Ever since then, I have distanced myself from people I cared about who were dying. Ironically, that included my father, too. Perhaps he understood. Or perhaps he didn’t.

Where have these traumas gone, I wonder? They have been worked through as best I can. I don’t think about them particularly. And yet I don’t forget them either.

My mother had a traditional funeral, at which I spoke, hard as that was to do. There was also the scattering of a jar of her ashes in Santa Barbara in 2003, for her American family, and one in Ireland, before that. We were actually out on a small ship in Dublin Bay for that one. The captain had to stop because of the choppy waves. He stopped near Dalkey, which seemed right. Her best friend, Harriet, lived there. It was in October, her birthday month. I was nearly seasick and somehow stopped myself from vomiting as the gray ashes poured out of the urn. I watched, aghast, because I didn’t realize that was supposed to happen. Then we all ate at a restaurant in Greystones my mother had long patronized. The staff brusquely asked us for more money at the end. I can’t say it’s a good memory, or one that I ever even think about now. My younger brother had wisely absented himself from the event, but of course, I couldn’t.

You would assume that I would think about this every October, but I don’t. I don’t remember the date on which we did it, but I suppose it was her birthday. I do think of her on her birthday every year. I’ll think about my father, too, on his.

My one remaining aunt, Joane, sent me a bag of old photos recently. There is one of my parents’ September 1964 church wedding in Santa Barbara, which I have privately dubbed the shotgun wedding. Had I ever seen this? Perhaps, years ago, but maybe not the full picture. The two families are standing together closely, almost huddled together—no one else was allowed at the wedding because my 19-year-old mother was pregnant (she later miscarried). Of my mother’s three younger sisters, only one is still alive. And right next to my paternal grandmother stands Richard, my father’s older brother, who is also still alive at the age of 90. The bride and groom are gone. I said that to myself recently and tears rose to my eyes, just for a moment.