You live on - in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here...Death ends life, not a relationship. - Mitch Albom

All parents damage their children. IT cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.
The damage done by Eddie's father was, at the beginning, the damage of neglect...
All parents damage their children. This was their life together. Neglect. Violence. Silence. And now, someplace beoynd death, Eddie slumped against a stainless steel wall and dropped into a snowbank, stung again by the denial of a man whose love, almost inexplicably, he still coveted, a man ignoring him, even in heaven. His father. The damage done.
~pgs 104, 110

You have one family. For good or bad. You have one family. You can't trade them in. You can't lie to them. Sticking to your family is what makes it a family.

Silence was his escape, but silence is rarely a refuge. His thoughts still haunted him.