Alicia Abbott

I mean, I felt like it was a privileged position.

You know, as I had... Growing up, I always felt we had this privileged relationship that, you know, somehow I was number one in his heart and he was number one in my heart.

And it was almost a romantic idea for me, which helped me get through the difficulties I had of growing up motherless and in the situation we were in.

And so...

On one level, it was very hard for me to be nursing for my father and making end-of-life decisions with him without help of another family member or just dealing with the day-to-day of a dying person.

But on another level...

I liked having that all to myself.

There were friends who could come in and help.

But, you know, in the hierarchy, I was the daughter.

It was a privileged place to be.

And at his funeral, you know, I was able to make a lot of the choices about what would be read, in what order, what pictures would be put up.

And I felt being able to do that was a way of being close with him and...

You know, it was sort of an expression of our intimacy, I guess.

He didn't leave them with a big sign saying, read this.

But he didn't burn them.

He didn't destroy them when he knew he was sick.

Basically, I was clearing out our apartment in the Haight-Ashbury because I wanted to move out.

and was in the closet digging through boxes of stuff and found a huge stack of journals which I'd never seen before.

So I was always aware he kept journals when I was a little girl, but I had never seen the journals from when he was with my mother.

And at that moment that I found those journals, I read about my mother's death for the first time.