I don't recall any specific incident that brought us here. No screaming matches, no phone receivers slammed down in anger, no dramatic send-offs - nothing to indicate that things would turn out this way.

Although he lives in the very same city as I do, a mere few miles away, I haven't spoken to my father in over a year now.

I'm not sad, or curious, or bothered at all by the lack of contact between us. I don't feel that I'm missing anything in my life by his absence.

The only thing that makes this all strange is that once upon a time, my father was my idol. No one was permitted to say a bad word against him (and after my parents' divorce, believe me, there were many on my mother's side who had a few choice things to say). As I got older and smarter, I realized that my father was not worth idolizing at all. The tides of my feelings about him started to turn, and by the time my sister's funeral was behind us by a couple of months, I saw him for what he really was: a selfish, self-centered, self-absorbed ass of a human being.

My sister's funeral expenses totaled over $10,000 - and the funeral home wouldn't hold the service unless they had every dime beforehand. My grandmother and her sister paid for the funeral, with the understanding that my parents would each be responsible for repayment of half the costs.

My father correctly realized that my mother would more than likely never have to pay them back for her half - after all, she was their daughter and niece - but it was nobody's business if they chose to pay for her half of the expenses. Yet my father didn't think this was fair to him. Why should he have to pay for half if my mother didn't have to do so?

I was stunned by his entire attitude. This was his daughter, who had just died in a horrible way, and he couldn't understand that he had an obligation to do what was right, regardless of what anyone else would or would not have to do.

Thus ensued a battle of ridiculous proportions. I told him he should turn to his family to contribute to his share - he has a dozen or so brothers and sisters - one of whom was such a livid bitch at the funeral that she literally shoved my grandmother and great aunt out of the way in order to sit behind my father - causing the two of them to wind up sitting on the very last fucking row of the church - during the services they paid for! (Ironically, this aunt was also one of my favorite people when I was younger and more ignorant of her true colors.)

For a while, I made payments to my grandmother on my father's behalf, so ashamed was I of his immaturity and irresponsibility. But I couldn't afford it either, and to this day, over nine years later, my grandmother and my aunt have not received a dime from my father for the costs of burying his daughter.

That was the beginning of the end of our relationship. He did nothing to redeem himself, and I had no desire to see him redeemed.

A few months after the funeral, I went to visit him for one reason or another. He showed me a briefcase someone had given him, one of those with a six digit combination lock on it. He proudly showed me how he had used Brandy's date of birth as the combination: 05-17-72.

There was only one problem. 1972 was the year of Stefani's birth, not Brandy's.

It was a sad testament to the kind of father he'd never been.

Like I said, I don't believe I'm missing out on anything. I don't feel any real animosity toward him, just indifference. I see this broken relationship as the way things should be, not as something that needs to be fixed. I haven't really had a father for almost 30 years now, and it's too late to go looking for one now.

Somewhere along the way, I have just stopped caring about my father. He learned nothing from my sister's death, while I learned far more than I wanted to.