He never calls. In fact, he had never called me on this phone ever - the one I've had since I changed my phone number way back when. I actually checked. Scoured online records to be sure. My father had not called me in almost two years.

So when he called the day after Christmas, I was surprised and delighted. I was not suspicious, because it's not in my nature to be. It's in my nature to be happy when someone calls. To love being remembered. Do you know there's nothing that scares me more than being forgotten? I'd rather be resented, or even hated, than never thought of at all.

When he called, he was upbeat; this is not common. He wanted to talk about Christmas. I hadn't opened his present yet, I told him, we were celebrating a bit late this year. I would call him on Saturday. But on Saturday, he didn't pick up; this, on the other hand, is very common.

When I got his text on New Year's Eve I was confused, but not because of the fever or the painkillers. The man hasn't mastered the fine points of voicemail and he'd suddenly learned to send text messages? Still, I thought, This is good. He's reaching out! To me! I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and pressed the green button.

Dad: Did mom accept my peace offering or not

And all at once, by the glow of my cell phone, everything was illuminated. Calling me on Christmas was not about me. Sending me a Christmas present for the first time in five years was not about me. It was a smokescreen. A gift-wrapped Trojan Horse to gain access to my mother.

Me: Yes, she did. She's sending you a thank-you note.

But then, I was wide awake, spurred up and out of bed, my skin stinging from the shock of cold and the pain of fever. And I was filled with ugliness and rage. Hurt, anger, malice. I paced between my bedroom and the kitchen, flinging insults into the darkness, hurting him in secret. I pictured him obsessing over her, buying that CD - one she won't have any reason to listen to, one that reaches back years, to my early childhood, when they may actually have been happily married. And I wanted to scream at him to fucking let it go. She doesn't think about you!

Me: Please don't use me to get to Mom.

Plaintive and simple, as though I hadn't asked him a dozen times before. As though this time he was going to keep his promise. I clicked the phone to silent, dug my toes into the carpet and threw it. I heard the crack of the battery as it hit somewhere in the dining room, knew I'd be gathering up the pieces in the morning. I ground my back molars together and went back to my room. This time, I thought, when he calls, I'm really going to let him have it.

But of course, he never did. Because he never calls.

Of divorce and war, I don't know which my father blames more for his misery, but they are the only two topics he wants to talk about. On Christmas day, it was divorce. When he should have been asking about presents and stockings, he was carrying on about how he’s been robbed of a wife and his future. I passed the phone to a sister.

A few times, when support and sympathy couldn't rouse him from his self-pity, I’ve become contentious, throwing logic, like stones, at a crazy old man. Here is the hard truth, I say, taking aim, feeling smug and powerful and right. And then ashamed and sorry. And cruel. Because, what kind of a person takes satisfaction in overpowering the weak?

Loving someone with a mental illness sometimes feels like a punishment. For a sin I don’t remember committing.

For years now, I’ve been straddling the divide between reality and the sad, twisted world my father has created for himself. As time wears on and those two worlds grow further and further apart, I’ve struggled with the idea that I must either become smarter, deal with it better or fail, and be ripped apart with the shifting.

Last week, I decided I was done. Not done loving or caring, but done straddling. Putting both feet firmly on the reality side of the line, I told my father I would no longer indulge him in his wallowing. I wouldn’t respond to even one more email about my mother and her new husband, wouldn’t let another lie go unchecked. Then I told him I loved him.

He may have heard me and understood. He may have decided I was just like the rest of them – another black-hatted villain in his serial melodrama. But my guess is the latter, since I haven’t heard another word. I should be sorry or worried. I know I should. But mostly, I am relieved. And disappointed in myself for how good that feels.

In the last year, his beard has lost all of its color and become shock white against his pale skin. His face is broader, cheeks hang flattened and deeply creased. His hands shake noticeably – a fact he seems to try to showcase, rather than conceal. I watch as he plays it up and then scans the table for a reaction.

I look quickly back at my own plate. I do not want to play this game. With this man I hardly recognize.

When he accuses his children of selling him out – amid rants about the government, his ex wife and the gun he keeps beneath his pillow – he grows stranger and stranger. From his mouth pours paranoia and self-pity and from his eyes, nothing. At times, the color grays out of them, leaving them pale and cloudy, like those of newborns and the dying.

I sit, pressing the tips of my fingernails into the flesh of my palm, trying not to feel the sickness that is ripping through my gut. Who are you… I think, searching for the familiar. And where did my father go?

Had we never met, I wouldn’t have found him alarming. Only unbalanced and odd, a statistic of an earlier war. But now he’s frightening and foreign.

One moment, he is calm and sentimental and the next, irrational and angry. His children – who were a sentence before, his heartbeat – are now cruel traitors in a plot to undermine and hurt him. I do not know whether to be furious or distraught. I do not make up my mind. Instead, I hiccup for the next several hours, my body unable to suppress the upset.

A year has made him a stranger. There are very few remnants of the man I knew in this man with the wiry mane and distant stare. In this profound absence, I feel as though there’s been a death. With so much loss to contend with, each new encounter becomes a small funeral. I find myself wearing sackcloth and ashes, and my emotions so close to the surface I’m sweating grief. And lacking a corpse, I’m forced instead to bury my expectations and my need for the way things were.