Last winter, I received a distraught message from a man’s voice I didn’t recognize. “Daddy’s dying, can you come?” My brother was in Washington state, where he and my father lived together in an overgrown and unincorporated part of the county near the Canadian border. I hadn’t seen or spoken to either of them in 30 years.When we were kids, my younger brother and I were inseparable, and people called me Daddy’s girl. For a sliver of my life, my father was my whole world. I was 3 when my parents divorced, and my dad took my younger brother and me from Alaska to California, leaving our mother behind. We saw her in short spurts during holidays and summers, but my dad became the center of our lives. Then, when I was 6, my dad married a woman my brother and I imagined could become a kind of second mother. We imprinted on her like baby birds fallen from the nest. After the wedding, my dad moved my brother, my stepmother and me to an A-frame in a small Northern California town in the mountains, the kind of place people go to disappear. Despite the near-constant disruption of my childhood, that brief time held glimpses of normalcy — coloring books at the kitchen table, rounds of Clue in the living room, vines heavy with ripe cherry tomatoes in our backyard garden. My dad traded handyman tasks in exchange for low rent, spending his years in the A-frame hammering door frames and floorboards into place while wearing a tattered T-shirt, leather tool belt and cut-off jeans. Down the hall from my bedroom, just under the open-rise stairs, was his workshop, where we weren’t allowed to go without permission. Amid the X-ACTO knives and Zig-Zag papers, my dad could often be found standing at a high table, woodworking, a joint hanging from his scruffy lip. Between carpentry jobs, my dad made jewelry boxes. The intricate, hinged tops were mosaics of cedar and pine, cut and arranged into a grove of redwood trees, a setting sun, a meadow of lupines. The one he made for me depicted a hummingbird drinking nectar from a hibiscus, but I could only see the rendering clearly if I relaxed my gaze and looked from a distance.I haven’t seen that jewelry box, or my father, in over three decades. But in my memory, I can smell the earthy scent of freshly cut wood, hear the soft, steady tone of his voice and see his shy eyes light up when he called me “Babydoll,” telling me I had my mother’s smile. The author as a baby with her fatherPhoto Courtesy Of Jacque GorelickDuring our second year in the mountain house, my mother died of a sudden and widespread cancer in a hospital bed in Alaska. My brother and I did not get to see her or say goodbye. Not long after, in our third and final year in the mountains, my dad’s violent temper and infidelity sent my stepmother away nearly as quickly as the cancer had claimed my mother, decimating our second chance at family. The three of us — my dad, and his broken-winged children — left that house in a churning wake of damaged things: picture frames, wedding vows, unharvested vines heavy with rotting fruit. What followed were years of bouncing from our dad’s girlfriend’s house to campgrounds to our grandparents’ country home. Until I said goodbye to my brother at the school bus stop on a weekday morning, unwinding his scrawny-limbed arms from my waist so he could go one way and I could go another. At 11, I couldn’t picture my life without my sibling, but I could not live another minute with the erratic man who had upended my universe. The choice broke me in two. While my brother spent his years orbiting our father in off-grid, icy corners of the continent, I spent mine trying to find belonging with our ex-stepmother, wearing her thin with my grief and anger. Neither orphaned nor adopted, I spent my middle and high school years feeling adrift. A stray. By 17, I was living on my own — miles and years from being a Daddy’s girl.The last time I saw my father, he drove down the coast from Washington to Northern California in a camper van to see me graduate from high school. He arrived days after the ceremony and parked on the street outside the converted garage where I exchanged babysitting for low rent. We spent evenings on lawn chairs in the back yard, talking under starry skies as he smoked hand-rolled tobacco and drank Rainier beer. I studied this bearded man with hair as long as mine and wondered if he’d ever felt familiar. The last photo the author has with her fatherPhoto Courtesy Of Jacque GorelickMy father oscillated between pride and regret over the distance between the girl I once was and who I’d become — an almost-woman he hardly knew. But any remorse he had about drifting out of my life was not enough to make him recommit to the role of dad. When I told him I needed him to be consistent and stop disappearing for months and years at a time, he said, “You know I can’t do that, Babydoll.”Within a week, he returned to the tiptop of Washington, where he lived with his girlfriend, her kids and my brother, whose loyalty to our father had long outlasted mine. We only spoke a handful of times afterward. My husband and two sons never met my father.Despite my brother’s pleas last January, I did not rush to the hospital. This time, it was me who couldn’t recommit to the role of daughter after not being one for so long. Instead, I wrote down addresses, title companies and the phone numbers of probate lawyers. I spoke to doctors and arranged for hospice — all from my home in California, two states away.I learned of my father’s passing in a three-word text from a gruff uncle I barely remember. The message echoed a truth I already knew: My dad is gone. Was he ever here? Now, his mobile home waits in the Pacific Northwest to be dismantled by my estranged brother and me, as our childhood and chance at growing up together once was. I wonder if I’ll uncover any remnants from our brief shared life.Since my father’s death, I’ve tried to understand this man who was once my whole world — who made me a jewelry box that was, like him, loved and lost in time. The mosaic of my dad portrays a complicated man who left behind ripples of pain, but also beauty: knotty pine boards with twisted burls that made faces on my ceiling, a hummingbird forever frozen in a wooden landscape, a plot of verdant land for his only children.All of it is proof that my father — who could not really be a father — was still capable of providing something enduring. I can see it now, but only from a distance.Do you have a compelling personal story you’d like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we’re looking for here and send us a pitch at pitch@huffpost.com.Relatedgriefestranged familydeath of a parent