Daddy Issues

Dedication

This book is for my beautiful niece, who taught me about self-harm and why people do it. She is an amazingly resilient young woman who indeed has self-inflicted scars.

In so doing she hoped to escape a far greater pain imposed on her by others. She has been misunderstood and I have the scissors which made the circular patterns on her stomach—which I consider an unusual emblem of honor that once had an unwieldy power over her (at least in my mind). I try to neutralize the power they once held over her by using them to snip my fresh spinach and Asian greens. That act might seem morbid, odd, to anyone who has not struggled with the unfathomable. I suspect it does not include many of you readers.

This is my prayer that she makes it to adulthood, to become a forensic pathologist, as she aspires to be.