At 42, I have had my fair share of losses. And the hardest loss of my life was losing my father. For a month he lay in a hospital bed, intubated, on a ventilator, fighting for his life before he was gone, without a goodbye. I had never spoken to him about the life he lived, or the impact he had on me. It took me years to understand what unsettled me so deeply about it. I have come to believe this is one of the hardest things a person can endure, to leave this world without ever knowing what their life meant to the people who loved them. Imagine you are sitting at the edge of your life, wanting to hear that your life mattered, but all you get is silence.
My father deserved to go knowing I cared about the life he lived. That I am grateful for what he did for me. And from the helpless desperation in my heart, I hope he felt my love and gratitude.
What follows is a letter that I wish I could send to him.
“Dear Dad,
I am sorry I did not say these things to you in person. I hope this reaches you, wherever you are.
These are the things I wanted to tell you before you left.
You once told me, when I had a secure job I was not happy in, that I should go take the risk I needed to take. Leave that safe job for a smaller company, one with limited resources and none of the safety net I had before. There would always be food at your table, you said, and a bed in your house for me. I was standing at the edge of something safe and something uncertain, and your words let me move. Because of that infusion of courage, I left the secure job and walked toward something uncertain, and that choice gave me the career and stability I have today. But it also taught me something larger. The greatest thing you can do for someone you love is not to hand them the answer. It is to remove their fear long enough for them to find their own. That is who I have tried to be, in every relationship, someone standing behind the people I love so they are free to choose, rather than someone trying to choose for them.
There were not many affectionate words between us. That absence has not left me, and I do not think it ever fully will. But looking back, I know you cared anyway, in the only language you knew. It showed every time you took care of me when I was sick. And it showed most of all when my marriage was ending, when I felt I had failed in one of the biggest responsibilities of a man. You never once made me feel that. Even if it was hard for you, even if you struggled with it in your own way, you stood by me and made sure I felt strong enough to walk into the rest of my life, not bent over by what others said.
We disagreed on plenty, but two of your principles became mine. One, there will never be a lack of food on the table for the people I am responsible for, even if it means sacrifice elsewhere. Food is never compromised, in quality or quantity. And second, you never borrowed money from friends or family for things you could not yet afford. You lived within your means. I have not always managed the second one. But for the better part of a decade now, I have worked my way back to it, building what I want through work rather than debt, because it is a value of yours I have come to respect.
Given another chance, here are the things I would want to do differently.
That I should have grown up sooner into someone who could say I love you and thank you out loud, instead of keeping it silent between us. That you shaped me for the better, in ways I have not always lived up to, and I should have told you so. That you lived a life far more meaningful than I ever made you feel. What I carry instead is guilt that does not sit still. It reaches for something to do and finds nothing, because there is no version of this where I get to go back and say it in time.
I also wish I had known you, before you were my father. Who you were, what you valued, what shaped you into the man who raised me. I let other people tell me pieces of that story after you were gone, when you were sitting right there all along and I never thought to ask.
And then there is a smaller, simpler wish underneath the rest. I wish you had seen who I grew up into over this last decade. I do not carry all the markers this world expects of a man my age, but I am in a far better place than where you last saw me. I wish you were still here for the small joys you loved so openly, cars, phones, shoes, always so excited by them. I would have bought you a better phone than the ones I could afford back then, better shoes than the ones I got you, and I wish we could have shared the fun of driving a car neither of us needed but both of us would have loved.
Dad, we did not agree on everything, and there were real differences between us. None of that changes what I have said here. You shaped me into a better version of myself than I could have built alone. I still carry the regret of never saying this to you in time. But I hope that how I carry you now, in my own life, is its own way of reaching you, even now.”
Losing my father, with so much left unsaid between us, changed my relationship with death, eventually. It changed how I want to treat the people in my life today, no matter how easy or difficult our relationship is. To let them know how they have touched my life, how they have made it better, what they have meant to me. I send the occasional small message, to all the people in my life I'm afraid of losing, the ones who have shaped it, to tell them so. I reach out now while my voice still can, because I never want my gratitude, and what they mean to me, to go unsaid again.
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