This month marks the 40th anniversary of my adoptive father’s death.

I still have no pleasant memories about him or our time we shared during those earlier years before my family fell apart when I was still in grade school. It is a long story, rooted in his alcoholism and what he unleashed on my adoptive mom and their kids: my adoptive sister and me. I’ve written about this before.

I’ve ignored this anniversary for decades.

However, this month I heard an interview repeated on NPR with the late Rob Reiner, who, with his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, was tragically found murdered on December 14, 2025.

Reiner talked about listening to a comedy album his father—the celebrated comedy writer and actor Carl Reiner—made. I realized my late adoptive father had comedy albums like this in his collection that I heard growing up. Then his ghost came rushing back to my memory, like Jacob Marley’s ghost visits Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas Eve in Charles Dickens’ “A Chistmas Carol.”

I did not go to my adoptive father’s funeral. I was in France floundering as an exchange student and very poor then, and it would have been impossible for me to go.

By then, in my own way, I had already forgiven him before I Ieft for college for the path of destruction he left in his wake. I did that because I had to come to terms with who I was and who he was. I needed to do that to get on with my life, and it was an important moment in my life and path toward becoming a better person.

I talked about that in my book because this was an important part of my experience as an adoptee confronting the harsh reality that adoption can force on many adoptees.

Ultimately, my adoptive father was an unhappy soul, tormented by demons, which he unleashed on others. Still I also found something good from those dark years. I grew up fast, and ultimately adversity early in life helped me confront later challenges that surprisingly did not break me. I had a hidden inner strength I could tap into—rooted in lived experience.

We’re all tested in life. He was my first hard test, stretching a long time. I won that test, I think. But it was not simple. Few things in life that count are simple or easy.