Please release me

From my father’s album:

I Should Have Been There

An anxious moment
A panicked flight
‘Just young and foolish’
Don’t make it right
I should have been there

First steps to mama
First day of school
First pitch, first strikeout
I was a fool
I should have been there

First costume contest
First pony ride
First disappointment
First time she cried
I should have been there

Tough girl at fifteen
Left all alone
Grief-stricken, shattered
If I had known
I would have been there

The spitting image
Her mama’s face
My own eyes flashing
A moment’s grace

Long years of silence
Come to an end
This second chance is
A long-lost friend

From girl to woman
As time goes by
The years so fragile
Is this goodbye?

From child to mother
Daughter to wife
So time continues
This precious life

Wish I had been there….

His label is chomping at the bit to release this album. Valerie sent me the contract today. It’s a generous contract. I should probably sign it. I should probably play nice and share my father with his fans, who have no idea any of these recordings exist, and who will almost certainly crash Apple’s servers downloading them from iTunes the instant they are released.

I should, but I don’t know if I can. It’s bad enough when I find myself in some public place, minding my own business, and my father’s voice suddenly drifts out of some speaker embedded into the ceiling and takes me back to the day I lost my mother and had to choose between forgiveness and insanity. It’s taken me years to get used to that, to be able to hear it without falling apart in the middle of a restaurant or the dentist’s office or the lumberyard while strangers stare at me as if I’ve lost my mind.

Beautiful as it is, I don’t know if I can handle being blindsided by this gift from beyond the grave while I’m picking out avocados at the grocery store or waiting for the optometrist to update my contact prescription, y’know?

— Sierra