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I remember the pain I felt when granddaddy died. His wife was no longer my grandmother but he had been married to this woman for over 30 years. My granddaddy was the only man that I ever called “granddaddy.”

“In his new family” as I used to call it, he had a wife, the daughter they had together and two step daughters, that his wife had when they got together. Nonetheless we were still his family. He was my granddaddy because he and my grandmother were married. They had my uncle, who 8 years younger than my mother.

He was there when I was born and I loved him dearly. But when he died, my mother cried like she had lost her only daddy. Well she did, he was her daddy and not the man that fathered her. He was apart of her life since she was 7 years old. He experienced all of her life with her.

So, you can imagine how I felt to read his obituary and see her listed as a stepdaughter with the other daughters. The truth of the matter was that my mother made him a daddy and called him daddy before anyone else ever had. She was his daughter before he had any other son or daughter.

I was a little hurt that my mother had been reduced to such an insignificant existence in her daddy’s life. Isn’t that what the obituary is-highlights and statements of the deceased’s life?

I have concluded that nobody can define your relationships with other people, only you can. Nobody can write you out of your narrative. They can exclude you from their story, their timeline and their recollection but you can’t be erased from actual events and reality.

She was his first daughter and he was her daddy.